With new direct mail automation tools, marketers can now generate triggered HubSpot postcards at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Recent technology breakthroughs make the production, printing, mailing and tracking incredibly easy.
When using these new, automated HubSpot postcards, the key is to focus the right content, messaging and calls to action for each step of the journey. Savvy marketers are seeing sizable increases in the inbound marketing ROI as a result.
The Buyer’s Journey
For today’s digital marketer, understanding the buyer’s journey, and how content needs to be mapped to it, are integral to everything. A buyer’s journey will vary dramatically, depending on the type of product or service you provide. For complex B2B sales, a deal might take months or even years to go from the awareness stage to closing the deal, while B2C marketers may be focused on smaller, more transactional sales that can happen in hours or days.
While every organization has a buyer’s journey with it’s own particular intricacies, there are some commonalities. Most buyer’s journey follow these three phases:
Define The Journey. Regularly
Best practices dictate that marketers regularly segment their audiences and define or review their customer’s journeys. Consider questions such as:
- How do buyers educate themselves for your product?
- What are the goals of your buyers?
- What are the most important pain points your product or service solves?
Once you start to understand your buyer, you will need to figure out the best way to engage with your buyers during their journey. List and workflow driven HubSpot postcards can deliver your messages in a way that augments each of your channels for true multi-channel marketing.
Engaging with the Modern Buyer
Connecting with the modern buyer is easier said than done. Recent research shows that B2B buyers are 57% of the way through the purchase decision before a supplier sales rep is engaged. In the B2C world, 81% of shoppers do research online prior to purchasing.
As a result, marketers are investing heavily in their digital marketing efforts to engage the modern buyer. However, this focus on digital does bring with it a problem of its own – specifically that there is so much digital content being produced, it has grown ever more difficult to make your voice heard. To put things in perspective, there was an average of 149,513 emails sent every minute in 2016.
A Less Crowded Channel
Savvy marketers are turning to less crowded channels to connect with prospects. Direct mail is one tactic that boasts high engagement rates and trust factors, for example, but has been underutilized in recent years.
New Tools Make Direct Mail Viable Again
Why has direct mail become the less crowded channel? Well, as digital marketing technology has revolutionized the way that organizations deliver their messaging, traditional direct mail hasn’t evolved much in the past 20 years. It has been the same slow, manual production process, with limited visibility into delivery & response metrics and hasn’t integrated with the digital channels or core automation systems that dominate marketing today.
However, new direct mail automation tools that integrate direct mail with marketing automation are changing the game. Using this new, cutting edge software, marketers can achieve the high engagement rates of direct mail while also leveraging HubSpot functionality like workflows, reporting, list building, and more.
Automated HubSpot Postcards In The Buyer’s Journey
To help you engage with your prospects, we have put together some tips on how HubSpot Postcards can be used through each stage of the buyer’s journey.
HubSpot Postcard Design Tips – All Stages:
What to do:
- Create clear content that speaks to your prospect’s pain points and elicits emotion
- Postcards are a highly visual medium – use larger formats with high quality, powerful images
- Use whitespace – let your headlines and images breath!
- Test – use different formats, images and calls to action to continually optimize
What not to do:
- Try to say too much – postcards are like mobile emails – they’re scanned first, then read. Stick to 1 or 2 key messages
- Use too much text – let your prospects eyes easily move through your messages
- Bury your response URL or QR Code. Your prospects probably want to go online to learn more. Make it easy for them to go to a landing page to learn more
Awareness Stage Postcards:
During the awareness stage, your prospect is only beginning to realize they have a problem. Your goal here should be to stay top of mind and educate your prospect in order to help them diagnose the full scope of their business problem. You want to inform your prospect that you provide a solution which they should consider, but, at the same time, you do not want to be overly promotional.
Using the Postalytics direct mail editor you can design HubSpot Postcards in minutes. You can also select which HubSpot list you would like to send your postcard or direct mail to, and use your data to send unique messages and images to each of your audience segments.
The key in building awareness is staying relevant. Remember, your prospects don’t spend all day thinking about the problem or your solutions. So it is important to segment your database by factors like industry, job title, and even buyer persona. Delivery rates for HubSpot Postcards are high. With a high quality mailing list, you can be confident that your message will reach over 95% of your audience. Well designed, high quality HubSpot postcards are touched, looked at and often kept on a desk or shared within an office. If you get your message in front of your prospect during the awareness stage, then don’t waste your opportunity by sharing a generic one size fits all message.
Consideration Stage Postcards:
By this stage your prospect has fully defined their business problem. Your HubSpot Postcard should get into more specifics than your earlier materials did, without burdening the user experience with too much copy. Once again, segmentation and relevance is absolutely essential. If you are sending a direct mail to a CMO in the tech space, the language and content should be much different to what you would send to his or her peer in the manufacturing space. Your goal is to use the personalization tools in modern, direct mail automation platforms to send highly targeted messages that speak to specific business problems for each of your prospects.
Case studies are strong candidates to promote in the consideration phase. Case studies are a tried and trusted marketing tool – and for good reason. It is only natural that prospects will veer towards companies who have solved similar problems in the past. If you have provided a solution that matches your prospect’s particular use case, then you should tweak it to fit your postcard format. Any proof you have that your solution does exactly what you say it does will help you advance to the decision stage. Use a large postcard (6×11 vs. 4×6) with a headline describing how you solved the same problem that your target has. The call to action is to visit a pURL that downloads the case study to learn exactly how the problem was solved.
Decision Stage Postcards:
Once your buyer reaches the decision stage you are in the home stretch. Here, you really need to go into detail on your product features and how you differentiate yourself from other competitors. It is absolutely essential that your messaging is on point during the decision stage. Direct mail can really help you get your voice heard during the decision stage – when you most need to be in front of your prospects.
In terms of the type of HubSpot Postcard you should send, think about content that will help “close the deal”. If you’re buyer’s journey is transactional, make an offer with a time limit. If your journey is more involved, try to find ways to get the decision maker(s) connected to your sales team. Product demonstrations are a great way to get all of the decision makers together online, with tailored presentations designed to bring the decision to a close. Remember HubSpot postcards are the teasers, your landing page contains the detailed content.
Your Buyer’s Journey Is Better With HubSpot Postcards
The modern buyer’s journey continues to evolve. Tactics that have worked so well over the past few years have to be adapted and reworked to meet expectations. Digital marketing today has grown overcrowded and noisy making direct mail one of the most effective methods of getting your message in front of prospects. Modern tools like Postalytics can help you generate postcards from HubSpot workflows and lists, and can monitor response in ways never before possible.
To learn more or to speak with one of our specialists: