Want to reach your consumers but tired of the intermediaries and dependence on other platforms? Direct marketing is the answer.
Instead of relying on others to promote your business, direct marketing helps you reach your consumer with personalized marketing campaigns and messages. Because it communicates directly with your target audience, it can deliver a higher conversion rate at a lower cost.
There are many popular direct marketing avenues, like direct mail marketing, email marketing, calls, social media marketing and texting campaigns. But managing these campaigns comes with its challenges. That’s why businesses have started using direct marketing tools to manage and optimize their campaigns.
As a direct mail automation platform, we created this guide to help you find tools to streamline your direct marketing processes.
Let’s get started.
What We’ll Cover:
What is Direct Marketing?
Direct marketing is a type of business outreach that involves conveying information about your company, products and services and sending it directly to your target market.
Direct marketing strategies often reduce the number of stakeholders involved to two or three, focusing on encouraging recipients to take direct action. For example, if you send an email campaign with recommended products for the consumer to purchase, your CTAs will bring them to your website instead of a third-party site.
The results of these campaigns used to be difficult to ascertain. But with direct marketing tools, you can easily get conversion and engagement data for these campaigns and use this data to refine and optimize future campaigns.
What are the Advantages of Direct Mail Marketing?
The five key advantages of direct mail marketing are:
Targeted Communication
Unlike mass marketing, direct mail marketing allows you to personalize the message to suit the needs and requirements of your target audience. Receiving mail that feels tailored to them makes the recipient feel special and heard. You can craft different content and imagery for different audiences to increase the chances of conversions.
Bypass Traditional Marketing Channels
Consumers are tired of getting the same messages through the same channels. They are looking for brands to get creative or form a special connection with them. Direct mail marketing allows businesses to form that relationship. It also helps you beat the competition by strengthening your presence on different channels.
Cost-Effectiveness
When you cut the number of stakeholders involved in your campaigns, you can save a lot on costs like distribution costs. Another advantage is that with direct marketing, you choose the set of recipients instead of targeting everyone. You can reduce costs by not sending mail to people who wouldn’t have bought your product or service.
Response Tracking
With the advent of tools and in-built ways to measure the success of each direct marketing campaign, you can quickly get insights and optimize your campaigns. For example, if you see a lot of QR code scans through your direct mail initiatives, you can find out what engaged these recipients and how you can bring this forth for your other campaigns.
Efficient Tools
Direct mail marketing doesn’t have to be difficult any longer. You can create, deploy, and track campaigns in one platform with efficient direct mail marketing tools. You even get access to features like address verification, QR code creator, etc., that make your campaigns more engaging and converting.
Direct Mail Marketing Tools
Direct mail marketing tools allow you to create, test, deploy, and track your campaigns. Here are some must-have tools for your tech stack.
Direct Mail Automation
Direct mail automation tool provides five main functions:
1. easy-to-use postcard and letter editing tools,
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or marketing automation integration,
3. personalization options,
4. a cloud-based platform to manage the entire process,
5. a triggered direct mail option.
Platforms like Postalytics offer integration with all the major CRM and marketing tools, which allows you to carry out an integrated approach to your campaigns. It also has variable data and variable logic, so you can personalize the mails without wasting much time.
Address Verification
Does your company get a lot of returned mail? Having rogue addresses can erode your margins and increase your budgets because resending those mails to the correct addresses again is costly and time-consuming.
Platforms like Postalytics offer an address verification system that ensures your shipping address is in the correct format. Also, your addresses are run through CASS and NCOA databases to provide you with the current and most accurate address.
The platform even cleans your mailing lists so that they are up-to-date.
Direct Mail Designer
A good direct mail design draws attention and encourages the recipients to take action. Postalytics offers an online design and editing tool with readymade templates and intuitive features to customize your design, looks, and campaign triggers.
We also provide drag-and-drop functionality so even non-tech-savvy people can easily use the platform and create visually appealing designs.
Email & Direct Mail Automation
One of the main reasons why businesses shy away from direct mail marketing is that they think it’s too difficult to manage. But what if you could deploy a direct mail campaign with just a click?
Direct mail platforms provide you with that functionality. All you need to do is design the piece, choose your postage package, and select a direct mail option.
Then, you can track the mailings to determine when people open and click through to your site. You can then use this insight to guide future campaigns.
Direct Mail Retargeting
You shouldn’t miss out on potential customers who checked out your product or came to your pricing page but didn’t complete the purchase.
With an in-built mail retargeting software, you can reach out to these prospects with personalized messages encouraging conversion. You can even define triggers for retargeting your leads (for example, send a mail two days after an online user adds products to the cart) and let the platform do the rest.
Direct Mail API
Instead of figuring out how to construct UI-intensive functions like campaign wizards, template building, and direct mail analytics presentation, the Postalytics Direct Mail API provides a modern approach to sending automated direct mail.
APIs help you weave together applications your team uses and build your workflows so you can get the best out of each platform.
HubSpot & Direct Mail Integration
If you use HubSpot as your marketing tool, you can integrate it with Postalytics and reap three key benefits:
- track every mail piece through delivery and response,
- cut direct mail products from weeks to minutes,
- integrate with HubSpot lists, workflows, and contacts.
This integration helps you trigger direct mail postcards and letters and sync everything to keep records clean and updated.
Here’s how Zogics leveraged this integration to see a 500% increase in their ROI.
Direct Mail QR Code Generator
You can now embed QR codes on your postcards, flyers, brochures, letters, etc. These QR codes can build interactive experiences for consumers, and they can reach your website just by scanning the code instead of typing in the URL.
With Postalytics, you can easily drag and drop your QR codes into templates and track open rates.
Postcard Personalization
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to shell out lots of money to personalize your postcard campaigns. Platforms such as Postalytics allow you to use templates created by professional designers and easily design and personalize them.
You can personalize hundreds or thousands of postcards using variable data and logic in minutes. You can even set up triggers to deliver these postcards at the right time to the right audience.
Letter Personalization
Personalized letters help form a connection with the recipient and show them that you value their business. It also helps increase customer loyalty and retention.
With Postalytics, you can create these letters at scale and customize them for each recipient. If you want to take this personalization to the next level, you can create pURLs and QR codes that take recipients to personalized landing pages made just for them.
Agency Tools
If you’re an agency working with clients who engage in direct mail activities, you can provide a fully white-labeled solution to them with Postalytics.
You can access unlimited dashboards, provide clients with delivery and response data, complement direct mail initiatives with other marketing initiatives, and add a margin percentage to each piece to watch your bank account grow each time you send a campaign for your client.
Final Thoughts
Direct marketing tools put the control back in your hands. It can ensure your marketing campaigns run smoothly and give your team the insights they need to increase ROI and conversions.
While choosing these tools can be challenging, the best way is to pick one platform that fulfills most of your requirements.
By subscribing to Postalytics, you can access everything you need for your next direct mail campaign. If you’re an agency, our platform lets you seamlessly manage multiple client accounts in one place.
To learn more about the tool, get in touch today.