Sometimes, adhering to direct mail marketing best practices means pairing your marketing tactics with other forms of communication. For example, you could email your audience to remind them to watch their mailbox. The mailer they receive could drive traffic to a custom web page, and so on. Issue calls to action.
If you wonder how outstanding e-commerce brands are achieving email marketing success day after day, then keep reading. From world-class copywriting to eye-catching design, I’ve gathered the nine best email marketing examples I’ve seen to inspire your future email campaigns. In this post, you’ll find.
Nonprofit Letter Mailers. With Full Color Outer Envelope. Get attention with a full color envelope that.
When done right, direct mail can be memorable, notdisposable. Targeted direct mail has a very distinct and significant advantageover email — when someone receives something in the mail they have tophysically look at it. Many/most people who receive direct targeted emailsdelete them without ever even looking at them.
In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the direct mail marketing best practices you can use to increase your audience.
1. Target your best prospects
Focus your mailing on the people who clearly have a need for the product or services you are selling. You don’t want to sell a lawn mower or landscaping services to someone who lives in an apartment building. And, a roofer wouldn’t want to solicit homeowners living in homes that are new or even under 20 years old. Targeted direct mail allows you to focus on the recipients who are most likely to need and want to purchase your product or service.
2. Use more than one channel
Sometimes, adhering to direct mail marketing best practices means pairing your marketing tactics with other forms of communication. For example, you could email your audience to remind them to watch their mailbox. The mailer they receive could drive traffic to a custom web page, and so on.
Direct Mail Marketing Letter Examples
3. Issue calls to action
Calls to actions (or CTAs) are among the most important direct mail marketing best practices, and they’re also good practice for essentially any marketing campaign.
Your CTA should be clear in directing your audience to the next step you want them to take when they get your mailer: Visit our website, call us to set up an appointment, download our new white paper, make a compelling offer, etc.
4. Customize your message
Imagine you were running for office and had to give two speeches, back-to-back: one to a group of teachers, the other at a nursing home. We’d wager you’d tailor each speech to fit the audience. The teachers would want to know how you’d fix the school system, while the seniors would probably want to hear more about health care.
The same thing is true with your direct mail marketing campaigns. You need to customize your messages for different audiences. Speak their language and use terminology that fits their industry.
5. Make it personal
While customizing your direct mail content is important, it’s equally important to try to personalize each piece of mail as much as possible.
Technology such as variable data printing allows you to include the recipient’s name – or even messaging designed to connect with them – on a piece of mail. It’s far more personal than sending your mailers to “occupant.” Leverage your data that you have to change your message, or even your imaging for each recipient.
6. Make it stick
There’s only so much you can say on Facebook or Twitter. But direct mail gives you the chance to share a wealth of information with your audience, whether it’s on a flyer, postcard or brochure.
And direct mail tends to stick around. Research has shown a little more than a quarter of mail stays in the home for more than a month.
They’ll have plenty of time to take notice of your content, so make sure it’s worth noticing by including customer testimonials, factors about how your brand can benefit customers and exclusive offers.
7. What next?
Your job isn’t done once the mailer goes in the mail. You should have a follow-up plan ready. Work with your sales team to make sure they know how to move the conversation forward from the mailer’s CTAs. Consider doing an email campaign that keeps your audience engaged with extra content.
Is your company about to embark on a mailing campaign? Do you have additional questions about direct mail marketing best practices? Turn to PDC Graphics.
We believe in doing much more than simply printing mailers and sending them on their way. Our goal is to boost your ROI by tapping into new segments of your customer base and creating personalized mailers that connect with your audience.
Contact us today to request a quote and find out more about how we can assist you in your next direct mail campaign.
Every business needs a marketing channel that is measurable and trackable, which is why so many people have abandoned direct mail.
But if you’re interested in customer retention and you’re trying to grow your business, then direct mail can be an easy solution.
So, what’s the trick? Isn’t mail expensive, slow, and immeasurable?
Well, not anymore. Data + automation + direct mail = trackable and RELEVANT.
Direct Mail Piece Examples
The Data & Marketing Association reported that digital channels on average get a 2% response rate.
Whereas direct mail response rates are:
5.1% for house lists (permission-based lists brands build in-house, such as current or past customers).
2.9% for prospect lists (lists provided by brokers and direct mail providers, such as targeted demographic lists).
Imagine the potential conversion rate when each mailed offer is relevant to the recipient?
Today I’m going to show you:
1Why You Need Direct Mail — But NOT The Traditional Kind
2Three Examples Of Successfuls easy to start. This is a great way to manage the activity and experiences people have with your business.
Direct Mailer Ideas
If you don't need a full-fledged CRM, an email marketing platform can be used for more than just emailing your customers; most service providers let you add a lot of custom data to each record.
2. Create Segmented Lists
Segment customers based on behavior. For example, when someone signs up for your newsletter or makes a first purchase, they should enter a marketing automation tailored for a personal experience. Emails and ads will target each customer at specific moments of their customer journey.
3. Add An Automated Direct Mail Service
An automated direct mail service can schedule postcards just like you schedule an email, complete with custom event triggers for when to send the mail. There are a few services that can do this; one that easily integrates with CRMs is Inkit.
4. Trigger The Mailing Within Your Marketing Automation
Once you integrate a direct mail software that syncs with your CRM platform, you can pull data from the CRM to build and automate a relevant direct mail campaign.[*]
If you’re using a CRM that integrates with direct mail software (such as Drip, Sailthru, HubSpot, Iterable), you can trigger the mailing within your marketing automation. Otherwise, you can export lists for batch mailing.
Here's what a marketing automation looks like on the back end of Michael McCarthy’s (CEO of Inkit) Iterable CRM platform.
Here you see a sequence mapped out for when a customer fills out a form with an address field on your website. Each action is performed based on event triggers. Here’s how the direct mail campaign is triggered:
When a subscriber joins a list, a welcome email is sent.
Two minutes later, the action Call this webhook connects the direct mail automation platform with the CRM marketing automation.
From this point on, the two platforms are integrated for that subscriber.
Now Michael can add direct mail postcards as an action once an event happens. For example, when a person unsubscribes from an email newsletter, he can automate sending a direct mail postcard with a special offer. Michael can schedule retention postcards to large groups, segmented lists, or individuals. If you don’t use a CRM platform, you can still use a direct mail automation service, but each mailing will be manually scheduled. Inkit has a way for you to upload a CSV of client lists to craft personalized direct mail campaigns. When you upload the client list to the software, you can send a mass postcard with the click of a button and the mailing will hit houses in 4-7 business days. Using Inkit’s variable data feature, you can even customize these mailings with dynamic content insertion.
This service saves you trips to the post office, the printer, and adds a level of unparalleled speed and efficiency for direct mail.
5. Optimize Results By Split Testing Direct Mail Campaigns
Now that direct mail is automated in your marketing automation, you can do some split testing of your mail campaign to increase your conversion rate over time. This will help you strategize the best way to frame your message using direct mail.
Here are seven steps on how to A/B split test your direct mail pieces:
Export your customer data as a CSV.
Add an extra column to that file.
Use the =RAND() function in either Excel or Google Sheets to create a column with random numbers.
Use this column with the random numbers as your sort column, and your records are now in a random order. Split the randomly ordered list in half by cutting and pasting half of the rows into a new CSV file.
Title one bucket A and the other bucket B.
Upload these lists to a direct mail automation tool or any mail option of your choice.
Decide what to test. You should only test one variable at a time, so here are my three suggestions for the types of tests you should try:
1. Two Different Designs
This will help you find out what is the most effective way to displayyour offer.
Take a digital campaign and draft it into a postcard or reuse an old email that didn’t get the online buzz you’d hoped for. Make one for bucket A and one for bucket B. (I always recommend keeping bucket A as the control group and B for the challenger.) In bucket B you will modify the headlines, text size, color, imagery and copy. See the postcards below.
Try to make the variable what is being emphasized. In this case, it is the design.
Track results by comparing outcomes between the A group and the B group at the end of the test.
Pro tip: Don’t just test different postcards—test concepts (e.g., postcard vs. lumpy mail). You want insights you can apply across future marketing campaigns.
2. Two Different Offers
This test will show you which type of offer is most effective. Is it price? Convenience? Benefit? Here are some testing ideas:
Specific dollar amount discount vs. percent discount
Store credit vs. free gift card
Free shipping vs. expedited shipping
Free trial vs. prorated new customer discount
The postcards below send a slightly different offer with the same design to find out which has a better response: percentage discount or dollar amount saved.
To track these results, you can create a unique code or a URL for each test offer and compare conversion rates. Then use a statistical significance calculator to evaluate the results.
Be sure to include an expiration date on your mailing offer so that you know when to calculate the test results.
3. Two Different Campaigns
Test one campaign that is only online, and a second campaign that partners direct mail with an online campaign.
This test will tell you the value of adding direct mail to your online marketing. Direct mail works as a driver to your website, but this will tell you if the result is great enough to benefit your business.
For this A/B test, you will have one campaign with direct mail and one without. Have both groups receive the digital elements of your campaign, such as an email sequence. Then, edit one group’s automation workflow to add a postcard (or several) reinforcing the offer.
Compare the total revenue or activation rates between each group: those that received the mailed offer vs. those that didn’t.
Pro Tip: Make sure both campaigns are sent at the same time so that delivery timing is not a variable in your experiment.
Over time, if you continue to split test your direct mail campaigns, you can see significant gains over your competition.
Why Direct Mail Automation Benefits Your Business
Here are five reasons direct mail automation benefits your business.
1. Eliminate The Manual Process
You know working with direct mail providers can be slow and tedious, requiring long lead times before you can hit mailboxes. Automated direct mail makes the process modern and allows you to implement the strategy from your desktop. You can sync your data with a software that will let you take the lead. No more printers, brokers, or post offices to start a killer campaign.
Best Direct Mail Marketing Examples
2. Minimize Subscriber Churn
Postcards are less annoying than an email in your inbox every day. If you can perfectly time a postcard to jumpstart a customer’s subscription or incentivize engagement, then you are less likely to impact churn, like how NatureBox saw a negligible churn during their automated direct mail campaign.
3. Create Ongoing Revenue Streams
When you continuously trigger mail for events along the customer journey, you generate an ongoing source of income for your company. This can keep revenue circulating throughout different times of the month. Like how Fresh City sent postcards with a prolonged expiration date so people redeemed the offer over the course of a few months, which started a long wave of customer orders.
4. Re-engage Unsubscribers
Direct mail campaigns should not be used for massive (and poorly targeted) acquisition plays. If you focus your direct mail budget on retention, then the results can be phenomenal. You can easily anticipate the appropriate time to re-engage customers at the mailbox when you track their purchasing history and analyze their online activity.
5. Build Trust And Loyalty
Mail has a physical touch point that can create an emotional bond with a person. If you integrate a modern direct mail strategy then you can begin to make an emotional impact on your customer. You go to the next level of creating brand loyalty with your customers.
3 Key Takeaways From How To Grow Your Business With Data-Driven Direct Mail
Here are three key takeaways:
Mail is powerful and can be relevant in our digital age. Adding a direct mail automation service for retention efforts can drive sales without pestering your customers and save you time and resources in the long run.
Implementing a data-driven direct mail strategy means using data to send relevant and timely mail that re-engages or wins back customers. For continued growth, you can automate a direct mail postcard to be triggered at crucial times in the customer journey.
Sending direct mail postcards to a segmented list of customers who haven’t purchased for consecutive months can bring substantial results. Using your CRM data with a direct mail automation service (like what NatureBox did with Inkit) can immediately boost sales and streamline the process.
Best Direct Mail Campaigns
If you’d like to see more examples of how ecommerce businesses are using direct mail to reduce abandoned carts, get repeat purchases and surprise customers on their birthday, get my direct mail postcards swipe file below.