3 Easy Ways to Leverage Direct Mail

In earlier posts, I interviewed direct marketing guru and Adobe Campaign UK Sales Director, Mathieu Lavedrine, bringing you his 5 key best practices for direct mail campaigns. Then, I went back to Mathieu for 16 top back-office features needed for effective direct mail campaigns. If you’ve read those, you’re well on your way to launching an effective direct mail campaign. But before you go off to do that, here are 3 easy ways you can leverage direct mail, based on our customers’ experiences.

Cross-Channel Consistency of Personalized Offers

Baxter Credit Union, or BCU, knows well the value of coordinated cross-channel marketing. Their members expect a consistent and personalized experience from their credit union, whether it’s on the BCU website, emails, app, or direct mail messages. Using Adobe Campaign, BCU marketers can set up member segments based on a near-infinite parameter set. Campaign then initiates emails, push notification, or printing of direct-marketing materials. John Sahagian, Vice President of Marketing for BCU, says they’ve seen “new accounts in one product area growing by 76%. In addition, attributed account balances increased 28 percent from 2012 to 2014.”

Euromoney Learning Solutions used Adobe Campaign to set up more than four times as many segments than they could before, going from 8 to 35, with 100 regional variants for each of those. Efficiently extracting these into a file, which they send to their outsourced direct-mail vendor, Euromoney can now send highly personalized, consistent, and relevant offline communications to their customers.

Triggered Digital and Direct Mail Reinforce Each Other

Digital printing leader, EFI, uses Adobe Campaign to combine traditional direct-mail campaigns with digital elements, focusing on interested leads. Sending both digital and direct mail at the same, appropriate, time means the customer receives coordinated messages separated by a few days, due to the different delivery intervals of online and offline channels. This emphasizes the message and reinforces it.

As an imaging-technology-based company, EFI likes direct mail and printed samples, since they place in their prospective clients’ hands examples of EFI’s wares. Adobe Campaign automatically cleans data collected through Web forms and forwards the final list to the CRM, which automatically triggers direct-mail samples followed by a personal call from a sales rep.

Communication With Customers Who Don’t Opt In to Email

In a previous post, I described how l’Occitane uses unified customer experience to improve satisfaction and grow their business. L’Occitane, a global cosmetics and well-being brand, automates campaigns across all channels. Committed to always using the ideal channel, the company sends direct mail to customers who haven’t opted in to email, avoiding upsets and taking advantage of the high open rate and time spent on direct mail items. The fact that customers perceive direct mail as premium also reinforces proximity and intimacy.

Takeaway

Direct mail is similar in many ways to digital marketing channels. However, it does have unique attributes that let you easily leverage it to enhance your overall marketing results. Cross-channel personalized marketing is more effective when you add direct marketing to the mix. Automatically triggered messaging arrives almost immediately for digital media but with a few-day delay for direct mail. Moreover, direct mail offers a high-quality way to enter customer’s homes and place your message physically in their hands.

Using both in parallel means direct mail reminds the recipient of the previous digital message and reinforces it. Where the product is a printed item, direct mail serves as a convenient means to deliver a physical sample. Finally, you can use direct mail to leverage contacts who have not opted in to email or other digital channels.