Effective Direct Mail Marketing: How We Make It Happen

Effective Direct Mail Marketing: How We Make It Happen

Over the last few posts, we’ve explained what today’s direct mail personalization landscape looks like. We’ve reviewed why it’s so important to customize and personalize your campaigns for more effective outreach. Personalization and customization are critical in direct mail because they engage recipients and drive measurable results. 

Now we’re going to get to the how. How do you take actionable steps and use these innovative techniques to bring your personalized campaigns to life?

Building the Foundation for Direct Mail Personalization

Crafting a personalized direct mail campaign goes beyond creativity to incorporate precision, technology, and the smart use of customer data for strategic outreach. It’s critical to start any campaign with a with a strong foundation.

How is the foundation built? Accurate data is the key to creating effective personalized campaigns. We can’t understate the role of clean, reliable customer data. Accuracy is crucial. You need to know your audience’s purchase history, demographics, and behaviors.

But today’s segmentation goes well beyond the basic demographics—name, phone, email, address. We need to move into the next level—behavioral or psychographic segmentation. 

What is psychographic segmentation? This next-level marketing strategy entails dividing your audience into groups based on certain psychological characteristics—values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, and personality traits. It’s all about those subjective and emotional factors that drive consumers. 

For example, a fitness company might look at its core demographic as women aged 25-40. However, with psychographic segmentation, they can break it down further to health-conscious, goal-oriented women interested in mindfulness and yoga. This allows you to personalize the message like, “Find your perfect balance at our yoga retreats.”

When you psychologically understand your audience, you can do more with customization and personalization. Your campaigns hit at a deeper, more meaningful level. 

Creative and Innovative Personalization Techniques

With advances in personalization techniques, you can make truly standout pieces. Tailor visuals, messaging, and offers to each recipient—target information around past purchases, donation history, and other custom factors.

You can also go with unique formats to catch the eye. Pop-ups, accordion folds, and textured mailers create pieces that literally “stand out” from the crowd. You can do so much with direct mail these days—it’s quite a leap from the standard pamphlets and postcards of the past.

Today’s direct mail is dynamic and exciting. Many pieces go hand-in-hand with technology, including options to take the customer connection even further. These digital options are important because you should always have a trackable component for direct mail. 

Trackable options include QR codes that take customers to specific landing pages for an interactive experience. AR (Augmented Reality) elements can make the digital experience even more engaging. 

Create customized offers. Align discounts and promotions with customer preferences and past purchases. Reward loyalty, too. For example, send out a “thank you” for a purchase with a message like, “Your loyalty deserves recognition! Enjoy 10% off your next purchase.” 

Using Technology to Scale Personalization

VDP (Variable Data Printing) is foundational to today’s campaigns, but keeping customers’ attention requires innovation and new approaches to complement VDP.

AI and predictive analytics are a quickly growing method for predicting customer behavior and delivering ultra-relevant messages. Data integration tools allow you to synchronize your CRM and direct mail for consistent, cross-channel personalization. Meanwhile, automation innovations help you easily manage campaigns and send tailored messages at scale. 

Not only do these new technologies broaden your reach, but trackable elements like QR codes, personalized URLs (PURLs), and coupon codes help you hold onto the data and incorporate it into future use. It’s hard to judge a direct mail campaign’s impact based on customer views. The trackable component works with customization and personalization—a strong CTA at the end brings them home!

With all this trackable data at your fingertips, you can keep tabs on conversions, customer reactivation rates, engagement, and more. Personalized direct mail can generate a 6.5% higher response rate (and even higher in many cases). You’ll be able to keep track of that data to optimize and refine your future strategies. 

Want to learn how to do more with your next direct mail campaign? At Heritage, we go above and beyond to help you build campaigns that leave an impression (and deliver on ROI). We know how to tailor direct mail campaigns to give you measurable results. Reach out today to learn more about the possibilities for your business or organization!

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