The B2B Direct Mail Comeback
With B2B direct mail marketing coming back into vogue, many marketers are either reacquainting themselves or learning about direct mail for the first time. New technology is blowing up, making personalized B2B postcards and letters easy to produce, mail and track for impact. Huge batches and long production cycles are a thing of the past, with self service tools and CRM driven automation driving triggered B2B lead nurture mailings and small batch sends that are more like modern email marketing than anything traditional mailers might recognize.
B2B Direct Mail Infographic
As the B2B direct mail landscape is changing, its a great time to look at some of the facts and fundamentals that underlie the renaissance.
B2B Direct Marketing Infographic
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Is Direct Mail The Forgotten B2B Marketing Channel?
With so much investment in digital marketing today, it seems that direct mail has become the forgotten B2B marketing channel. There is almost an entire generation of digitally proficient marketers who are unfamiliar with direct mail.
The arguments against direct mail marketing include:
- It’s time consuming to set up and implement campaigns. 4 – 6 weeks, compared to hours for email
- There’s a lack of visibility into what happens after the send. Especially compared to digital channels like email
Yeah But…It Works
Research, however, shows that there is a range of benefits that come with direct mail which should not be overlooked.
- Canadian neuroscience company True Impact Marketing conducted a study in 2016 which shows that direct mail requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital media, meaning that it is both easier to understand and more memorable.
- The same study found that direct mail has a much greater brand recall than digital advertising with 70% of subjects showing a higher recall rate than those who were shown a digital ad.
- The Direct Marketing Association found that 79% of people act on direct mail compared to only 45% for email.
- The response rate for direct mail marketing is 3.7% compared to only 0.1% for email marketing.
The Digital/Direct Divide
In spite of all these benefits, direct mail is only used by 50% of B2B marketers!
Why? A few of the reason (time, analytics) are listed above. But there’s another, deeper reason.
Direct mail lives outside the digital realm and, as a result, is disconnected from all digital efforts.
The fear among many marketers is that it can be difficult to produce direct mail campaigns that complement their core digital marketing programs. That has been the case for traditional direct mail.
Enter New Technology From Postalytics
The cause for that fear is fading. New tools, such as Postalytics, are woven into the very fabric of the digital marketing stack.
Postalytics is a new direct mail automation tool, that turns direct mail into a digital marketing channel. It’s a product of the team from Boingnet, who have helped thousands of marketers with easy to use tools and deep insights into the online behavior of direct mail recipients.
What makes Postalytics direct mail a digital channel?
To start, Postalytics is deeply integrated with CRM and Marketing Automation tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce and others. It also provides a rich direct mail API to enable virtually any software system to work with it.
To build mailpieces, Postalytics provides users with a drag and drop editor from which they can compose high quality, personalized letters and postcards with patent-pending tracking in minutes.
For the first time, direct mail campaigns can be used in triggered automated workflows, especially for B2B lead nurturing campaigns.
Designers can use Postalytics to build templates directly in the production environment, bypassing the old fashioned emailing and FTP processes of proofing their work. Leveraging our nationwide print delivery network, Postalytics cuts the direct mail production cycle from 4-6 weeks to 1 week.
Automated Direct Mail Complements Email Marketing
Business people receive over 120 emails each day. Postalytics helps marketers stand out from the crowd and deliver their message directly.
Direct mail is not tied to the same restrictions as email marketing meaning Postalytics users can upload lists from any source including events, tradeshows, conferences, salespeople, and data vendors.
Last, but by no means least, advances in offline delivery and online response tracking provide clarity and insight into the impact of every Postalytics campaign. You’ll know the delivery status of every piece of mail—whether it is delivered, forwarded or returned. Our patent-pending direct mail audience tracking provides a detailed understanding of how your audience responds and converts online.
Learn More About B2B Direct Mail Marketing
The team at Postalytics has years of experience working with marketers that use B2B direct mail with various automation tools. We can help you think through the best strategies to implement automated direct mail in ways that complement your B2B buyer’s journey.