Boosting your cross-channel marketing strategy with direct mail can offer a wide array of benefits for businesses looking to enhance their outreach efforts. In this article, we’ll break down the benefits of adding traditional direct mail marketing to your current marketing plan.
Understanding Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing refers to the strategic approach of using multiple channels to interact with customers and prospects. These channels can include digital sectors like email, social media, websites, mobile apps, and search engine optimization, as well as offline channels like direct mail, print ads, television, radio, and events.
Direct mail is a classic marketing approach that involves sending a physical print item to a list of customers or prospects through the mail system. Each direct mail piece would have some sort of call-to-action to initiate a response. It’s a time-proven method of marketing that is still effective today.
Benefits of Adding Direct Mail to Cross-Channel Marketing
Adding a direct mail campaign to your other marketing channels, both online and offline, can help with your response and conversions, along with other benefits like:
- Higher Engagement and Response Rates: Having a direct mail campaign that is attached to another channel (for example, a radio campaign or a paid social media campaign) can help boost brand awareness and therefore, increase the chances of response from direct mail.
- Personalization and Targeting: Direct mail allows you to personalize a physical piece and target a specific mailing list (whether customers or leads) directly to their homes. It doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy like online channels sometimes do.
- Tangibility and Memorability: Having a valuable direct mail piece (like a high-quality postcard, a professional-looking letter, or an attractive catalog) gives your marketing piece tangible value and allows the recipient to physically “hang on” to it for longer compared to a digital ad.
- Complementary to Digital Channels: Implementing QR codes, CTAs that direct to websites, and other digital integrations can create an effective link between your direct mail and your digital efforts.
- Response Rates and Conversion: Having other marketing channels running in tandem with your direct mail campaign can help boost response and conversion rates across the board.
How Direct Mail Complements Digital Marketing
Direct mail is a great complement to any digital marketing platform because it gives your online marketing efforts a true, tangible, and trustworthy medium to help in many ways, like:
- Driving Traffic and Conversions: A direct mail package that has a CTA that directs to a website can help boost website traffic. This causes a residual effect with search engine optimization (SEO) by improving the authoritativeness of the website, which is a metric that Google uses when ranking. Increased rankings can lead to more traffic and conversions in the long run.
- Nurturing Customer Relationships: Reaching out to customers using offline communications like direct mail—especially personalized direct mail—can lead to better customer relationships. A great example of this is sending product catalog, greeting cards, or invitations to special events.
- Re-Engaging Dormant Audiences: If your clients aren’t responding to email marketing, social media messaging, or SMS, trying direct mail as a way to re-engage is a great idea. Even if the CTA is an online action, you might see a spike in dormant audiences with an offline print direct mail campaign.
If you’re looking to augment your digital campaign with direct mail or vice versa, let the experts at North American Media help you create your next direct mail and digital campaign to get the best conversion rate possible. Contact us today to learn more.
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