In this online age, many business deviated much of their marketing budgets away from traditional print media to online or digital advertising. However, there are some tested and proven traditional media that are still vitally important to having a successful marketing mix. In this article, we touch on 5 major reason why your business can still benefit from using Direct Mail Marketing.
1. Advanced Targeting Capabilities
Many of the advanced audience targeting features that are built into digital marketing have been available for a long time in direct mail advertising. These features include geofencing and geotargeting, as a saturation mailing list targets all of the addresses within a carrier route (a subset of a zip code). Targeting on a carrier route level allows us to include or exclude routes based on residence type, or most importantly, by route performance.
With a customer that does regular mailings, we can track and report response rate at the career route level and use that data to decide what routes to target on continued mailings.
Also like digital advertising, we can target types of residences by Age, Auto Makes/Models/Years, Gender, Hobbies, Homeowners, Income, Pet Owners, and Renters.
Depending on your company’s needs, our experts will help you come up with the best strategy for getting you direct mail promotion into the correct mailboxes.
2. High Response Rate
You might be surprised to find out, but direct mail actually has a response rate than all of the digital advertising competitors. Direct mail generates a MUCH HIGHER average response rate of .5 to 1%. Social Media, Email, and Internet Display ads only have an average response rate of .02 to .1%. **
Direct mail also has a higher read rate. 79% percent of households at least scan their direct mail daily and 55% report they read their entire direct-mail daily. Most people do not sort through their individual emails daily. Usually they select all and delete. ***
3. Direct Mail gets Undivided Attention.
80% of direct mail recipients scan or read each piece before throwing anything away.
Digital ads are often intrusive and considered to be noisy, and emails can be discarded if the subject line does not connect with the target. Also, you often come across digital ads and emails when you are working or researching something, so they are ignored. In comparison, you receive a piece of direct mail when you’re at home, after work, with some extra time to view each letter.
Direct mail naturally gets more attention because there are fewer distractions when people see it. The average person receives 2 pieces of physical mail per day – compared to 107 emails or 63 ads they see each day. As people get less and less physical mail, the items that they do receive stand out.
4. Direct Mail is Memorable
Studies show that physical media leads to a more emotional response than digital media, and can lead to improved recall and a more memorable experience. The human brain is wired to process physical items much easier than we process digital ones. Studies show that the brain uses 21% less cognitive effort to process direct mail than digital advertising.
Also, because Direct mail is a tangible medium, it can be endlessly creative and reach prospects on an emotional level and make a more personal connection, generating a 1 on 1 relationship without noisy distractions. Digital viewers are busy and inundated with competing notifications from email, social media, and display ads.****
In a cognitive study out of Canada, it was fount that direct mail also has Better Brand and Offer Recall, as consumers who received direct mail advertisements were able to recall 75% of the time, compared to 44% for digital ads. *
5. Pairs Well With Digital Marketing
Studies show that Direct Mail Advertising can be a far more effective tool to “motivate action response”, while Digital Advertising is a great tool create additional interaction and saturation.
Though this article touches on the fact that digital advertising has a lower response rate than direct mail on average, that does not mean you should abandon digital marketing entirely. In this digital age, your company needs the exposure that digital ads and social media can provide. Also, it is vitally important to be available to your customers to connect with online.
With competition so intense in every market, an Omni-channel approach is what you need. An Omni-channel approach refers to connecting both physically and digitally with the consumer. Multiple channels are utilized, in both traditional and digital media. Each channel presents you brand in a consistent manner, and each channel is connected to each other to that the consumer is exposed to multiple branded touch points. With our advanced reporting, these customer interactions can be tracked, and each interaction will show up as an instance that eventually lead to a conversion.
When pairing digital and direct mail together, it is key to understand these two key points:
- SATURATION = Digital and Social Media Advertising
- ACTION = Direct Mail Advertising
Sources: *True Impact Marketing , **Direct Mail Marketing Association, ***campaignsandelections.com, ****entrepreneur.com, *****dmnews.com
