When running multiple direct mail campaigns, tracking the metrics can become a nightmare.
That’s why you need direct mail management tools. With them, you can keep workflows organized and functioning seamlessly and access all your metrics and key campaign details at a glance.
Direct mail platforms like Postalytics offer dashboards to view and manage your campaign performance. Our suite of tools helps you create aesthetic direct mail pieces, improve collaboration and deploy your campaigns quickly.
Let’s first learn what direct mail management is and why it’s important.
What We’ll Cover:
What is Direct Mail Management?
Direct mail management allows you to streamline your mail activities, including
- Creating campaigns
- Getting mail lists from your CRM tools
- Verifying addresses
- Deploying mail pieces
- Tracking mail performance
While this process used to take 4-6 weeks for a single campaign, direct mail automation has drastically reduced the turnaround time.
Why Does Direct Mail Management Matter?
Businesses want to create and deploy campaigns as quickly as possible. Direct mail management helps achieve that goal.
Without proper direct mail management, your data will be spread across different platforms. This can cause issues for your team and lead to confusion and miscommunication. For example, if you’re sending direct mail creatives via email, someone might overlook a critical comment or might be working on an outdated design.
Errors can be costly and increase your turnaround time. Direct mail management addresses all these problems so activities can run smoothly without any unwanted mistakes.
What Can Direct Mail Management Software Provide?
Direct mail management software has four main capabilities:
Analytics
Your team might create the perfect direct mail campaign, but it could still fail to resonate with your audience. When this happens, you need to understand why.
That’s why you should always track direct mail analytics. Access to this data gives you the right insights to optimize your campaigns and determine what’s bringing the best results.
Direct mail management tools provide analytics on response rates, returned mail rates, delivery status, etc. With tools like Postalytics, you can create multi-channel campaigns which are easy to track. For example, you can utilize pURLs and QR codes on your direct mailers to bring your potential customers online and track their activity.
This is a great way to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Creative
Getting your direct mail design right is essential for catching your audience’s attention.
But getting it right isn’t as easy as it seems. You could face many problems, like sharing the design with your team on the correct platform, collaborating via email, missing out on comments, or starting from scratch without easy accessibility to templates.
Direct mail management tools help you integrate third-party design tools so you can easily create your designs, get access to a library of readymade templates, and collaborate with your team on designs so every feedback comment remains in the loop.
Print Production
Instead of having to manually take care of the printing process, direct mail tools can automate this for you.
Postalytics provides an in-built proofing tool that ensures your design is foolproof and ready to print. The tool checks grammatical and formatting errors, ensures proper image quality, and reviews whether images and text are correctly lined up so they don’t get cut during the trimming process.
Automating the printing process ensures you don’t have to waste your resources and send your designs for re-printing.
Finishing
The final part of the process is finishing, which involves storing your campaign details and the responses you generate.
You can either create this storage on the cloud or host it offline. The latter option can lead to accessibility issues, as updating things offline can be problematic as it does not automatically get updated for everyone on the team.
Direct mail management tools store all this data, which you can readily refer to anytime. You can store templates, so your team doesn’t have to start from scratch for every campaign design.
Benefits of Using Direct Mail Management Software
There are seven key benefits of using direct mail tools. Let’s quickly go through each of them.
Saves Time
You can automate a lot of repetitive tasks with direct mail tools. For example, instead of sending hundreds of emails to share and get feedback on a design, you can invite collaborators on your tool and get the entire process done on a single platform. All these efficiencies add up and can reduce your turnaround time from a month to a week.
Secure Data
Whether you want to send invoices or relay confidential data, you must ascertain that your data will remain secure. Most direct tools now provide compliance and data security enablement, ensuring no data gets leaked while printing or sending direct mail to your customers.
Track Campaigns
You might be working on many direct mail campaigns like welcome mails, activation mails, purchase reminders, or coupons for upcoming sales. Tracking the response or delivery rates of these campaigns could be time-consuming, especially if you deal with bulk mail programs. Adopting a direct mail management platform lets you access a dashboard to track all your campaigns and get a bird’s eye view of the critical metrics.
Reduce Costs
Direct mail tools help you reduce costs in many ways, like saving labor costs and money spent on resources by utilizing a single tool for all your campaigns and saving money that is usually spent on re-printing or re-sending mails because of a wrong address or wrong formatting error. These tools also offer great deals on direct mail print prices because of their huge client base and networks.
Improve ROI
Direct mail automation tools offer many personalization features that you can use to make your campaigns more relevant and engaging for each user. These features help you personalize bulk mail without any extra effort. By providing such engaging experiences, you can get a higher response rate, leading to increased traffic, more conversions, and increased brand awareness. Combined with reduced costs, this increases your overall ROI.
Ready For Scale
Are you seeing great results for your direct mail campaigns? If you’re doing things manually, increasing the scale of your campaigns could be a tough decision. But with advanced tools, you can scale at any moment. For example, you can use templates or variable logic features to personalize thousands of mailers or even fetch lists from other tools to target wider audiences and get better results. Scaling has never been easier.
Integration with other Tech
Creating lists manually or getting designs from one tool to another can be messy without proper integration. But thankfully, direct mail tools come with integrations for your important toolsets. For example, they integrate with CRMs so you can easily import data and lists, and they also integrate with design tools to share designs without impacting the quality. Postalytics also integrates with Zapier and other tools that help set triggered campaigns.
How Does a Direct Mail Manager Work?
Here’s how you can get started with a direct mail management tool.
Add Your Mail List
The first step in selecting a mailing list for your campaign is determining the goal of your campaign. For example, to boost brand awareness, you’d want to include people who haven’t heard about your brand. On the other hand, if you’re sending upselling campaigns, you need to include those who have subscribed to your lower-tiered plans.
Once you know the kind of people you want to include, you can import your lists from CRM or other marketing tools you use to capture customer data.
In Postalytics, you can do it easily by adding your integrations.
Create Campaign
Postalytics provides an easy checklist to guide you through all the steps for setting up an effective campaign. These steps include;
- Creating a campaign design
- Adding visuals or importing imagery from third-party apps
- Selecting templates
- Activating smart send or triggered drip campaigns
- Setting up online tracking initiatives like pURLs and QR codes
- Proofing your addresses and formatting via in-built tools.
You can share these campaigns with your team or clients so you can get feedback and improvise accordingly.
Launch Your Campaign
With direct mail tools, launching your campaign is as easy as clicking a few buttons. The provider takes care of everything, like printing, putting the mail pieces into envelopes, and sending them to USPS or other mailing services to get them delivered.
With Postalytics, you can send samples before you launch your campaign. Seeing and holding a sample helps you gauge your mailings’ quality, finish, and feel. To do that, navigate to Campaigns in the top menu and select Send Samples from the dropdown. Next, add your mailing address, and you’re good to go.
Track and Monitor Campaign
Direct mail tools offer a 360-degree tracking functionality so you always know how your campaigns perform. Postalytics provides real-time dashboards that show key details like the number of mailpieces sent, the delivered pieces, the response rates, etc.
If you use pURLs or QR codes, you can even track the online activity of those that scan these codes and arrive on your landing pages.
This kind of visibility into your direct campaigns makes direct mail marketing a great complement to your other digital marketing initiatives.
Final Thoughts
Direct marketing has become one of the prominent channels to reach potential customers. But unlike digital marketing, manually managing your direct mail activities can consume your time and resources.
Direct mail management tools like Postalytics make the entire process easier and allow you to deploy campaigns quickly. If you want to know more about how you can utilize Postalytics, reach out to us for a free trial or a quick demo.