How Direct Mail Can Improve Your Digital Efforts

While digital marketing has revolutionized the playbook for small businesses, allowing entrepreneurs to reach massive audiences for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising, one of the oldest tactics in the arsenals of marketers has actually continued to become more powerful in digital. age. To the untrained eye, direct mail may have become an overlooked strategy among other channels such as social media. However, marketers ignore it at their peril. In fact, incorporating direct mail into a digital campaign can pay significant dividends.

In a world where digital notifications never stop, it can be easy to forget that people still interact with email on a daily basis. That's part of what makes direct mail so important. Competition for space in a consumer's mailbox is less intense than their social flow. This creates an opportunity for marketers to increase how often their target market sees their message both online and offline.

How can direct mail improve digital?

The frequency and number of touchpoints through which you are able to impact your target audience is critical. This means that impressions cannot start and stop only in the digital world. In fact, the most effective marketing campaigns target the same audience across digital and traditional channels. Direct mail is the first traditional channel that can provide the same precise audience targeting as digital. You can create a list of recipients by interests, age, gender, location, etc., the same way you would in a data-driven digital campaign.

Plus, there are now platforms that allow you to run a digital campaign alongside a direct mail campaign in the same place, using the same data and audience targeting across all channels.

Jim Fitzgerald, CEO of Taradel, a platform that integrates direct mail and digital campaigns, says, "The biggest misconception is that direct mail is dead. It's not. Maybe it's easy to confuse the decline of first class mail, traditionally used for statements and billing purposes, with the booming industry of marketing mail.The reality is that direct mail response rates have never been higher, and technology has made direct mail a more efficient, data-driven ad serving vehicle."

He goes on to explain that there is a misconception about direct mail being trackable. “Advertisers use a myriad of tools, including call tracking phone numbers, QR codes, campaign-specific URLs, coupons and promo codes, for attribution purposes. These tools allow advertisers to track direct mail response rates and conversions with the same precision as digital campaigns,” he says.

How to plan a direct mail strategy

If you've decided to launch a direct mail campaign, there are a few things to remember when strategizing how to incorporate it into your digital efforts.

There should be clearly defined goals that are consistent with your digital efforts. Consider what type of action you want to drive from this campaign, what impressions you need to generate, and how you will track them.

Second, just like in your digital campaign, you need data to build an audience. Ideally, this should be the same audience you are targeting through your digital channels, so using a tool that allows you to target the same audience both digitally and through...