Think direct mail is a thing of the past? Think again: Direct mail marketing is still highly effective and can help you level-up your marketing efforts in a big way.
With that said, you need the right direct mail solution—offered by the right direct mail marketing partner—to ensure success. Let’s talk about important considerations when choosing a direct mail solution and partner for your business.
Evaluating potential direct mail partners? Here’s what to look for:
1. Strategic Support
Effective direct mail marketing starts with strategy. When choosing a direct mail solution, it’s important to look for a technology partner that specializes in direct mail marketing and next-gen custom printing technology. A true partner will ask the right questions to help guide and tailor your direct mail marketing strategy to meet your business’ needs.
What exactly does direct mail strategic support look like? It means helping to work out important details such as customer segmentation, campaign reporting, measurement and analysis, lapsed programs, and customer acquisition and retention.
Your partner should know how to work with data to support targeting marketing for your campaigns based on specific demographics, geographic location, and more. Additionally, a direct mail vendor that offers mailing list acquisition and one-time list rentals can help expand your reach among your target audience.
2. Printing Production
With so many different print options available to you, why limit yourself? The direct mail solution and partner of your choosing should offer a wide range of print products, including postcards, self-mailers, letter packages, card carriers, and more.
The ideal partner should be able to handle full-service print production and large print jobs with speed, accuracy, and efficiency. What’s more, your printing partner should have the ability, experience, and equipment required to produce high-volume, high-speed direct mail that’s fast and engaging, such as:
It’s time to get personal with your direct mail strategy—and you need a partner who can help you do just that. Personalization helps get customers’ attention and increases conversion rates, significantly boosting the ROI of direct mail marketing programs. In fact, research indicates that personalization, such as adding a person’s name to a direct mail piece, can increase response rates by up to 135 percent.
You can personalize almost every aspect of a direct mailer, including name and address, images and graphics, headlines, body copy, call to action, promotional offers, and regional-specific information like maps. How? Enter variable data printing.
Variable data printing for one-to-one marketing uses data to personalize certain elements of each direct mail piece without requiring manual work. This allows companies to use data to hyper-personalize direct mail campaigns at scale.
Logistics matter, and not taking them into consideration can derail entire campaigns if you’re not careful. That said, you can optimize your direct mail campaigns by choosing a partner and solution that can help with cost analysis and logistics planning.
An experienced direct mail marketing partner should be able to help lower postage costs to save your business money. There are numerous ways to reduce postage costs by 20 percent or more, which helps free up marketing budgets to increase circulation—or even just the profitability of your campaign.
Along with helping save on postage, the right partner will handle sending and tracking direct mail to ensure it makes it into your customers’ hands. Need to send a time-sensitive offer or announcement? No problem; a true direct mail partner can track what you send to make sure it makes it to the right person, on-time and at an affordable cost.
One thing is for sure: You need a direct mail partner that you can count on to deliver—and one who will make sure your strategy delivers too. Baesman does it all, providing end-to-end services including strategic support, data analytics, printing production, postage, mailing, and tracking.
If you’re looking for ways to take your direct mail strategy to the next level, start with auditing what’s currently working and what’s not. Complete our direct mail assessment.