Direct Mail Leads: 4 Easy Steps To Create Winning Campaigns

Digital marketers, are you capturing direct mail leads? Is direct mail a channel you could leverage more to generate warm leads?

Direct mail is an extremely effective but often underutilized channel for generating leads. It can give you a direct line to prospects and an opportunity to stand out from the sea of digital pitches, advertisements, and noise that business decision-makers are constantly exposed to.

According to USPS, around 98% of people scan or read their physical mail daily. Companies without the latest technology to efficiently generate direct mail leads are missing out on opportunities.

Using Postalytics, you can send highly personalized direct mail campaigns that can help you generate warm automated leads while collecting more lead data to help you segment your lists and deliver highly personalized campaigns through multiple channels. Savvy marketers also use direct mail automation to nurture B2C and B2B leads through the entire buyer’s journey. 

In this article, we’ll cover some simple tips that marketers can use to improve their direct mail lead generation efforts and improve the ROI of their campaigns.

#1: Segment Your List and Personalize Your Creative

The first and most important step we always recommend to our clients is to properly segment your data and personalize the direct mail creative that you send.

Data is the key to segmentation. If you’ve got demographic or behavioral data that you can include in your list, you can use that data to create audience segments. You can then target the segments with personalized messaging, offers and CTA’s.

Learn how to use mailing list segments to test offers and improve response in the Postalytics full overview of mailing list selection and testing.

Personalization is so important for getting your direct mail campaigns noticed and engaged with. Here are a few stats that help to illustrate this point:

• Personalized promotional mailings have 29% higher unique open rates than non-personalized mailings.
• If they get discounts or personalized offers, 63% of millennials, 58% of Gen Xers, and 46% of baby boomers are willing to share personal information with brands.
• 52% of customers expect direct mail to be personalized.

Often direct mail vendors don’t quote prices that include personalization. Why? Because they know that it is hard to do and expensive when done the old fashioned way.

Postalytics offers free personalization of postcards and letters with our easy to use variable data and logic tools.

Variable data offers the easiest way to personalize your campaigns using the data that you have already collected about a prospect. It works just like the “merge tag” concept of email marketing.

You can inject data like a prospect’s first name, last name, city, zip code, phone number, or any custom fields within your dataset into a template.  When your template is dropped into a campaign, it will pull the correct data records and insert them into the final postcard or letter.

This makes it easy for you to deliver campaigns that catch the prospect’s eye and convince them to read more. Wouldn’t you be more likely to check out a piece of direct mail if it had your name in big, bold letters in the headline?

Postalytics also gives you the power to generate dynamic content for different segments of your audience using our variable logic tool.

Using simple IF/THEN statements, you can display text and images that are relevant to your segments.

For example, you can send different messaging based on where prospects live.

In this case, we highlight the preferred local football team of a given area based on a prospect’s listed location:

With a little creativity, marketers are able to craft highly targeted messages to each key audience segment.

The great news? This is a one-and-done process. The same personalization rules will apply each time the template is used in a campaign.

#2: Make Your Offer Irresistible

In the end, your ability to generate direct mail leads and the overall success of your campaign will rest on the attractiveness of your offer. A truly irresistible offer can carry a campaign on its own.

While your ultimate goal might be to sell your solution, service, or product to the leads you generate, the offer you present to them in your direct mail campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be directly related to your final sales offering.

A few rules that you might want to consider to make your offer irresistible include:

• Make the outcome clear – For your prospects to be willing to provide you with their personal or business data, they have to get something in return. It could be a content offering, discount, free audit, or any offer — as long as your audience is likely to find it extremely valuable.
• Connect your offering to a pain point or desire for your audience – What pain or deep desire does your offer satisfy? The deeper the pain or desire, the better. All irresistible offers are emotionally driven in some way.
• Include social proof – Provide proof that it’s an amazing offer by including results, testimonials, or case studies to influence their decision-making. Providing proof that your offer will benefit your audience goes a long way.
• Make a guarantee – Guarantees mean something to your audience. Something as simple as guaranteeing a free phone consultation or a no-risk money-back guarantee can go a long way with your audience.

What an audience finds irresistible is different for every segment. Knowing exactly how to word your message and what kind of offer your audience will find truly irresistible can be the difference between an average campaign and one that drives jaw-dropping growth for your business.

#3: Create A Clear Message and Call To Action

Segmentation, personalization, and a compelling offer are all critical pieces of a successful direct mail lead generation campaign.

However, all of the work that goes into those is wasted if the messaging and call to action are not crystal clear.

It isn’t that hard to identify clear messaging and CTA’s and distinguish them from efforts that are lacking. Here’s a couple of pieces that were meant to generate direct mail leads:

Tommy John:

It is pretty clear what Tommy John is telling us. And it is also clear how to take action.

On the other hand:

This is an actual postcard back that we received. Nobody has any idea what Commonwealth Music School is trying to tell us. Nor what they want us to do. The front of the postcard had more info. But if this back side is all you saw – straight to the trash.

The most essential aspects of delivering a clear message to your audience come from your headline and call-to-action (CTA).

Let’s take a look at just how important your CTA is for the success of your campaign:

• More than 90% of people who read your headline will also read your CTA.
• Emails with a single call to action saw an increase in clicks of 371% and an increase in sales of 1617%.
• Personalized CTAs convert at a 42% higher rate than untargeted CTAs.

Make it clear to your visitors where they will be going and what they can expect to find when they get there. An effective call to action requires that they see the action as beneficial and worthwhile. While your CTA copy does have an influence on this, your campaign messaging as a whole work together to drive these points home.

#4: Using pURLS for personalized CTA’s

Personalized CTA’s can really help drive direct mail leads. Postalytics makes it easy for our customers to personalize their calls to action with a personalized URL (pURL).

This is a unique URL that is printed on a piece of mail, allowing you to track which users respond to your offer and collect other data about their interactions on your website. The URL will often include the recipient’s name or the name of their business. For instance, a pURL for one of your prospects named John Smith might look something like:

http://JohnSmith.domain.com

Seeing their name (or the name of their company) attached the URL you are asking them to visit greatly increases the likelihood of them taking action and piques their interest. It’s just another way to inject powerful personalization into your campaigns using Postalytics.

Here’s an example of a pURL call to action:

Postalytics allows you to generate unlimited pURLs at no additional cost. This means that you can include a unique pURL for every prospect that receives your mailer. Our system works differently from other pURL marketing systems in that we don’t require the use of a specialized landing page software Our pURLs can be used with any modern landing page or content management system through the use of redirects and tracked through our system.

Drive More Direct Mail Leads With These 4 Steps

Direct mail lead generation isn’t that difficult, it just requires discipline and a focus on direct marketing fundamentals. If you follow the steps we’ve outlined, you’ll put yourself in a great position to succeed in driving more direct mail leads in your next campaign:

1. Segment your list and personalize your creative
2. Make your offer irresistable
3. Create a clear message and call to action
4. Personalize the CTA with pURLs

At Postalytics, we help marketers generate direct mail leads every day. Want to learn more? Watch a quick overview video.