Direct Mail Planning for Your 2020 Marketing Goals

As we start the new year, direct mail planning is essential. The strategies we used in 2019 need updates to be more effective in 2020. According to the DMA, direct mail had an average response rate of 9% for house lists and 4.9% for prospect lists. How do your response rates compare?

Looking at more than just response rates, how did your other metrics do this year? Starting with the worst performing ones, devise a different strategy to increase performance in 2020.

About 66% of mail is opened and reviewed. Direct mail not only cuts through the daily marketing clutter, but has been proven to drive digital activity and influence online purchasing decisions. Are your direct mail campaigns as effective as they can be? In the digital marketing arena email fatigue, ad blindness, and the increase in ad blocking, have combined to result in stagnating and sometimes declining performance. Direct mail should be combined with these types of channels in order to boost overall performance. Are you taking a multichannel approach for 2020?

Direct Mail-to-Multichannel Marketing

We live in an interconnected world, your customers expect you to communicate with them through the various channels they use. The companies that do this effectively see the best results. When you use campaigns that include both digital and direct mail, you, on average, receive 39% more attention than a digital-only campaign. Research shows messages delivered via direct mail can be powerfully motivating, with 92% of people driven to digital activity and 87% influenced to make an online purchase. Are you planning how to be more effective at this for 2020?

Personalization

Are you using the true power of direct mail? Personalization through variable printing is powerful. You can alter copy, offers, and even images, based on each person in your list. There are even ways to utilize more information, such as demographics, geographies, psychographics, and behavioristic data to go beyond a regular piece to a truly specialized one. When you are able to do this, you drive response much higher than before. What are you going to try in 2020?

Retargeting

Want to try something new for 2020? What about retargeted direct mail? What do we mean by that? You can retarget online activity by reaching out with direct mail. Some of the most common ways retargeting works are: for abandoned shopping carts; people who visited your website, but did not purchase; contacting lapsed customers; or creating new customers. So how do you get the mail addresses for online contacts? You can take a list of email addresses and append mail ones, or you can take a list of IP addresses that have visited your site and append mail addresses to it, or you can use mobile devise owner information to append mail addresses.

Mail Formats

For 2020, we need to think outside of the box and try new things. If all you have sent are letters or postcards, try a new format to gain more attention. Consider sending larger pieces, because they get higher response rates. If you are selling a high-priced item, consider using dimensional mail in order to drive more sales. These are more costly to send, but the ROI is much better.

Get creative and have some fun planning out your 2020 direct mail strategy! Are you ready to get started?