Direct mail has a longer shelf life than many other forms of advertising. In fact, most direct mail has a 4–8-week lifespan. One piece of mail can create multiple impressions on your recipient as they interact with it. If you want to extend the life of your direct mail even further and increase its impact, add digital marketing components to your campaign.
How Does Direct Digital Marketing Work?
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is widely popular and can aid in moving people further down your sales funnel. However, most digital marketing is served to a general target audience. This means you do not know exactly who you are targeting.
You are able to select parameters for your audience such as age, gender, and location, but you may not want to target every female in the 40-50 age bracket who lives in Florida. With regular digital marketing, it’s difficult to know how successful your marketing campaign was and whether or not you are reaching the right people.
Direct Digital Marketing
This can be solved by doing Direct Digital Marketing. This type of digital marketing allows you to target the same individuals on your direct mail list across all digital media channels. For example, you can send Susan a direct mail piece, target Susan with Facebook and Instagram ads, remind Susan the offer is expiring through email, and run an ad during Susan’s favorite show on her Connected TV.
With direct digital marketing, you can surround the people on your marketing list with your message and keep your offer in front of them. You no longer have to spend money on an unknown audience. You can hand select which individuals you want to reach and only pay for what you need.
How Does Digital Marketing Extend Your Direct Mail Impact?
When you incorporate digital marketing, you are able to refresh your direct mail campaign as well as serve timely reminders to your recipients that the offer is about to expire. When people are interested in a direct mail offer, that mail piece tends to move around their house. It might sit in their car or on their counter for several days before they are ready to take action.
When they receive a digital ad or an email with the same offer, it reminds them of their mail piece. It’s also a great way to nudge people who haven’t responded yet. With digital marketing, you can run suppressions and remove people from the list who have already responded. This allows you to focus on moving those still in your sales funnel further down the line.
What Digital Marketing Channels Should You Use?
Digital marketing offers many different channels and opportunities to reach your target list. However, it’s important to note that not every channel will be a good fit for your audience. Even if a channel is exploding in popularity and trending, if your audience isn’t on there, then it’s a waste of your time and resources.
Knowing who you are targeting and what channels they interact with is vital information to the success of your digital marketing efforts. You can discover this information by analyzing your customer data and creating an in-depth customer profile. The most successful campaigns use a variety of channels to reach their audience.
We recommend targeting your marketing list anywhere from 9-31 times to increase the impact of your direct mail campaign. How many impressions and which channels you use to serve those impressions will depend on your industry and your offer.
How Do You Get Started?
The first step is to pull your direct mail list and see if it’s missing any necessary information. You will need names, postal addresses, and email or IP addresses to reach your target audience digitally. If you are missing any information, your data partner can append what’s missing. Once you have all of your data, you can upload your target list for direct digital deployment.
Direct mail has a cumulative effect that builds over time. We have seen an 8-15% lift in the first month for campaigns using both direct mail and direct digital marketing. After 6 months, those campaigns can see 30+% lift over direct mail only recipients.
If you have questions about how digital marketing can extend the life of your direct mail, reach out to our team.