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Last week we held a webinar in The Modern Marketer’s Best Practices Series on Real-Life Direct Mail Strategies to Crush ROI and Budget Goals, where our marketing experts talked about different budget-friendly tactics marketers can use to reach their goals and drive ROI.
Our speakers included Kim Courvoisier, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Lob, and she was joined by our VP of Demand Generation, Julie Ginn.
If you didn’t have a chance to join the webinar you can quickly get the key takeaways below, or watch the recording to get all the content.
In the webinar, Courvoisier and Ginn discussed proven marketing strategies that had real-world examples, how to leverage your customer data effectively, and how to make small changes to your marketing campaigns that have a significant impact on your ROI.
In a recent LinkedIn poll, we found that 44% of respondents indicated that their budgets had been reduced. So, Courvoisier posed the question to Ginn, “As a demand gen leader, what’s your approach when you’re faced with budget constraints but your goals remain the same?”
Ginn noted that as marketers we’re always being asked to do more with less no matter the economic conditions, but that we need to be hyper-focused on being more efficient and getting the most return for every dollar we spend. She made the point that you need to have visibility into your return on spend by channel and you have to have the proper reporting and testing protocols in place.
Finally Ginn noted that data hygiene is extremely important as you can’t make process improvements and automate your campaigns with bad data. She summed it up by saying, “Automation is worthless without great data.”
Courvoisier added that, “Using your own data is a blessing and a curse, depending on how reliable, clean, and accurate it is. But being data-driven is important and can enable you to do some really powerful things, especially regarding segmentation, personalization, and customization.”
Recommended reading: How Smart Businesses Avoid the High Cost of Bad Address Data
In essence, targeting and personalization is critical to the success of your direct mail campaign. Ginn commented that collecting home addresses is always challenging, but absolutely worth it. Marketers can easily integrate direct mail into their retargeting campaigns by:
Ginn added, “You can use data to target based on browsing history, past purchases, any kind of engagement. Then you can personalize and customize mailpieces by just about any field in your CRM – first name, industry, location, etc. The more specific the mailpiece is to a person, the better the results will be. Direct mail should feel like it’s arrived just in time to solve a personal and specific problem.”
Recommended reading: The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Personalization
One of the easiest ways to impact ROI is to reduce the time spent on the backend by automating certain marketing tasks, often ones that are time and resource-intensive.
One telecommunications company saw an 80% increase in campaign ROI and an 85% decrease in operational costs by automating the direct mail process for its acquisition campaigns.
“We have so many other platforms we have to tie into, above and beyond we loved how intelligent direct mail from Lob fit into that. If there’s technology to automate and make the process more efficient, my team can then be focused on strategy and innovation to drive business results.” - Director of Acquisition Marketing & Strategy
But, direct mail doesn’t live in a silo. It’s best when used as a touchpoint in an omnichannel customer journey. We often see our customers achieve outstanding results by combining email and direct mail.
“Direct mail is a critical piece of the marketing strategy puzzle. By using data from your CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and other integrations, you can precisely segment and target audience members to receive the right message at the right time in conjunction with other touchpoints in the customer journey,” said Courvoisier.
Recommended reading: The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Omnichannel Marketing
Dive deep into the topic of driving marketing ROI with direct mail by downloading a complimentary copy of the eBook: The Modern Marketer’s Guide to Crush ROI & Budget Goals with Direct Mail.
If you already have direct mail as a marketing tactic you want to invest in but are curious what the ROI could be, use our free Direct Mail ROI Calculator!
