It’s no secret that social media has taken the world by storm. There are 3.5 billion active social media users worldwide and the average amount of time spent on social platforms is over 2 hours every single day.

This is a huge group of people who are heavily invested in their screen time and interaction with a social media app. This opens up doors of opportunity to find and engage with new customers/clients. However, it’s also a very busy competitive space. 

When combining traditional mail with digital marketing, you can enhance the reach and impact of your campaigns. In this article, we’re going to focus on the connection between social media and direct mail and look at some simple ways you can integrate the two. 

Direct Mail to Hook, Social to Follow

Direct mail should act as your hook. It’s a hugely successful way to get your message in front of a highly targeted audience. It’s a far less competitive space in 2019 compared to the digital world and it actually carries more trust. Believe it or not, because direct mail is tangible and ‘real’, it’s proven that recipients trust it more and feel as though it has more authority than a digital message. This is really important when it comes to getting attention and building a connection of trust which eventually results in action. 

The other reason to lead with DM is that the demographics are much better developed and more precise.  If you were to target Dentists in New Jersey who have purchased a Chevy in the last 12 months, that is doable with a direct mail list.  It would be difficult to find anything like this for email or social media. We already know that “the list” is 70% of our success.

Once you’ve got the attention of a receiver, you can easily direct them to your social media channels if this is your goal. If it’s not a primary goal, simply including your social media handles (e.g @yourbusinessname ) and the platforms you’re present on can drive people towards them in the future. 

Use Social Media to Communicate

Depending on your audience, you could use social media to collect responses. Facebook messenger is a very popular way a brand can communicate with their customers directly and privately. This type of campaign would probably be more effective when targeting 18-35-year-olds because it’s a group of people that will already communicate with businesses in this way. 

In general, we should let customers contact us in ANY way they prefer – phone, fax, email, social media. Any additional channel we can give potential customers to reach us is a really good thing. If they prefer Facebook, then we want them to be able to use this.  The same goes for other forms of social media.

In one of our recent articles, we discussed using premiums as a tool to collect responses. This is one way you can get customers to interact and make contact in order to redeem an offer. 

Shout-out

Here’s another idea. Use part of your mail to focus on your offer and drive responses to that (whether that’s a call center or website). Use the other part of your campaign to shout about your social channels and what happens here. If you share exclusive discounts, giveaways and company info that will benefit customers on your social channels, let them know! Let them know why they should follow you on Instagram vs everyone else. What will they gain? 

If you sell home-ware will they gain interior design inspiration, ideas for easy storage and ‘Insta-worthy’ décor tips? If you’re in real estate, will you share newly available homes on your Facebook page the minute they go up for sale? There has to be an advantage for someone to jump on their device and seek you out. You can post all sorts of fun content, contemporary new home designs, homes of the rich and famous, homes of different peoples (Eskimo’s, cliff dwellers, houseboat users…). The key to social media is entertainment.

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.

Everyone loves a freebie, even the most simple and basic items that aren’t worth a great deal are well received when they’re free. From a consumer’s point of view, premiums build trust, create excitement and make the receiver feel valued as a potential customer. From a business point of view, they act as a great way to start a positive relationship and build brand awareness.

Lumpy Mail

When businesses send ‘lumpy mail’ with premiums like free samples or free merchandise, research shows that open rates are much higher. Even though direct mail is, of course, tangible, ‘lumpy mail’ makes it even more so. However, the cost and time involved in sending a campaign with premiums included are much higher. With this in mind, rather than focus on sending premiums as a tool to increase open rates, why not use them as a response device?

Opens vs Responses

Open rates are, of course, the first goal when it comes to any direct mail campaign. From here though, any open would be less valuable if it didn’t result in a response. Responses are your next goal, and of course more important than opens. 10,000 opens and 100 responses are far poorer than 5000 opens and 500 responses. You can see where we’re going with this…

Enough responses = a return on your investment. So focusing all of your attention on using premiums as a way to boost open rates could add a lot to the time and expense involved in sending a campaign without the desired result. Of course, you know this. But what if there was a better way, a way to almost guarantee that every receiver of a premium is a ‘warm lead’?

Here’s an Idea….

What if you made receivers call or visit your website to claim their premium? Short snappy messages such as ‘Call to Get Your X Today’ should push responses rather than opens. Open rates might well be lower because you’re losing that ‘lumpy mail’ advantage, but expenses should be less and responses higher. With this approach, you’re only incurring extra costs for those clients who are truly interested in your offer. Overall ROI could well be higher as a result of higher quality leads.

We couldn’t say without a doubt that this approach would work better than sending a premium in the initial campaign, but it makes sense to give this a try. The only real way to know what will work better for you is to test both methods in an A/B split test style approach, keeping everything else the same throughout the campaign. We recommend you start testing small quantities to find something that works for you and then turn up the dial once you have a winning formula.

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.

How do you successfully fit direct mail marketing into your overall marketing strategy and combine this with digital marketing efforts? It almost seems like a backward concept doesn’t it? Once upon a time, businesses contemplated how to make digital work and how they could expand their strategy to dovetail with offline efforts. Now the direct mail marketing space has become much less crowded it STANDS OUT above all that digital noise. But that’s not all, it’s also a very different place to what it was several years ago. It’s crucial to recognize how consumers search for information following brand introductions and how they interact with advertising both online and offline. Here are things to consider for a more integrated marketing approach:

Matching Data Files

Target the same customers across multiple platforms by uploading your direct mail data file to places like Facebook advertising or your email marketing list. Of course, this requires that you have email addresses for the same group of people you’re sending direct mail too. Email addresses could be more challenging to acquire for non-customers, but it’s a very good tool for re-marketing purposes or upselling. Increasing prospect exposure to your offer is usually very effective, as long as it’s not overdone. If you have time-limited or limited availability offers, sequential online ads could act as a real-time way to let customers know how much time is left, or how many spaces are still open, following on from the initial message.

Streamlined Messaging

Even if you’re not targeting the exact same group of people across multiple platforms, it’s still important to keep all branding and messaging the same with your online and offline campaigns. [This is super important. Consistent branding/messaging is key.] You could use color or image variations in adverts, as long as they are clearly connected. This means that if the same person does see more than one advert, they can make that brand connection instantly. This is where online campaigns really support offline efforts and visa versa.

It is important that brand/message is consistent, but we also don’t want it to get stale, otherwise, people just mentally ignore it. To deal with this advertisers can change the visuals slightly to keep it interesting, but keep the messaging the same.  Check out this example from Fresh Sep Kitty Litter. This same concept can apply to our dm and digital campaigns.

Create Combined Funnels

You might use a direct mail campaign to initially reach new potential customers and generate responses. However, those responses could be online. From here you could follow up with a thank you email and continue immediate communication (in relation to that initial offer) online. You can and should use direct mail to generate responses that happen in the digital world. The direct mail campaign has played its part in grabbing attention and creating action. The digital side takes over to continue the conversation in a place that customer (no doubt) spends a lot of time… on a device.

Direct mail and email as tools both have strengths and weaknesses.  Email is a very effective tool for building a rapport once you have a relationship with a customer.  Because of the volume of SPAM these days, it is a very poor tool for prospecting or finding new customers. One of the strengths of direct mail is the ability to target – the lists and demographics are very well developed.  It can reach every household and business in America. Plus, it is a welcome form for initial engagement. That argues for a strategy that starts offline and then morphs online with periodic touches offline as well.

Combining your offline marketing with your digital side enhances your messages and supercharges your impact. The takeaway points here are to stop thinking about direct mail and digital marketing as two completely separate funnels and start looking at them as a way to compliment each other. It can be a real shift in your approach to thinking about marketing campaigns, but as with anything, if you’re in doubt … always test it first. : )

Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.