Increase Customer Conversion Using Direct Mail Post Cards and Landing Pages in 3 Simple Ways.
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Despite the fact that email marketing still trumps other means when it comes to reaching out to prospects and customers alike, there are worrying sings on the horizon.
To confirm this, a recent survey by Adobe revealed up to 27% drop in the time consumers give to emails. What are the results?
Massive drop in open rates, lowered email ROI, and waking up to an avalanche of subscription request.
These are not good signs for any marketer. Commonly referred to as Email Fatigue, this growing reason for concern cuts across niches, industries and audiences.
More troubling facts show that 11% of customers are less inclined to email as a means of communication from 2017 to date. And of those that subscribe to emails, they end up opening less 30% of the emails, and read just about 75% of those.
What is the way forward as a marketer?
Send them more emails? That would be a terrible idea.
Do nothing or send fewer emails? Definitely not! Not if you want to meet your targets.
Here is what you can do:
Do something different- it’s about time you send them a mail along with postcards that are hard to ignore.
But there is a catch
Never rely on addresses from list brokers. Smart marketers use what they’ve got.
That’s not all
Rather than send mass mail using mail farms, they work smartly- by using automation tools to send consumers mail depending on their behaviors.
Wouldn’t you want to discover how they do it?
I’ll lay it all out on the table in today’s post so you can give your marketing campaign a major edge without breaking a sweat using landing pages and direct mail marketing.
Let’s get right into it, shall we?
First off,
Why direct mail?
Direct mail still works. That is the simple answer. Brands are discovering that consumers pay attention to their mails and thus making it an effective tool to get one over your competition.
Here are some facts according to USPS:
- 74% households are more likely to read or scan their direct mail
- 11-12% of those numbers plan to act upon offers they receive via direct mail.
What does this mean?
One, with a direct mail, you have a higher chance of reaching an engaged audience.
Secondly, you need to do your homework. Make your mails easy to scan and message plain to view.
With the above mentioned facts, using direct mail postcards can easily become the best marketing decision you’ll make if done right.
That brings to the obvious question:
How good is the conversion rate?
Without doubt, direct mail trumps TV or print ads and it is much easier to monitor.
Typically, the average response rate for direct mail is 5.3% and 2.9% for in-house and prospect lists respectively according to the DMA. From this deduction you’ll discover that the conversion rate is higher than that of email while it’s on the same level with prospect list.
And there is more great news
2016 saw 43% increase in response rates and doubled rates for prospect lists according the DMA which is expected to increase when paired with marketing automation. And if paired with laser targeted landing pages, the response rates can only get better.
To get more juice from your efforts, send a follow-up message to the consumers that say they will are more likely to act on 11-12% direct mail offers. This will catch the attention of those that must have accidentally discarded your initial correspondence.
So how do you achieve all these?
How show you how to combine direct mail with your digital campaign in 3 easy to do ways.
3 practical methods you can use both direct mail and landing pages concurrently
- Trigger a direct mail using a Landing page
This is particularly useful in getting the most of leads that are “hard to track” leads- those are the kind of leads that are interested in the freebies you have to offer them.
Use direct mail to reach out to them the second time.
To do this, simply create a landing page with an opting form to capture leads using your iPad from your marketing booth or from wherever, and then send these leads to a marketing automation tool that has a direct mail software integration to trigger a direct mail follow-up postcard whenever someone signs up.
And if you don’t have a marketing automation program yet, just export your leads toa spread sheet and then unto your direct mail software.
When they get your postcard, they’ll be reminded about meeting you at the event plus this is one more reason for them to be interested in what you’ve got to offer.
It pays to design your postcard to match your brand and design especially if they are striking. This will help your lead quickly place where they met you.
- Create a direct mail list using a Landing page
In this case, you’ll add the address you collect from a landing page to a direct mail list. With this method, you can send postcards automatically to your leads whenever they opting.
While this might not be a very bright idea if most of your traffic is coming from PPC ads such as Google ads or those from social media because this could result in a lead receiving multiple postcards even though some would have converted by then.
However, sending a reminder postcard to a lead that has not taken action could just be the perfect tonic to make them act. To achieve this, set up your time specific delay in your automation platform and add an “if or then” option to respond according to whether or not the lead converted.
- Direct mail offer using a Landing page
What this entails is that you’ll use a landing page as a destination where you’ll ask your direct mail postcard recipients to redeem their offers.
Here you can use this for retention or reactivation campaigns. By scanning for inactivity or via an inactive customer list, you can use this method for a campaign aimed at re-engaging these inactive audience.
Let’s say, you target is to get more trial customers to become active subscribers, all you have to do is to send them a postcard that will direct them to a landing page that looks like the one below.
Do endeavor to make the landing page straightforward but include a smart way to segment your visitors. An example is including options for regular emails or for discounts.
The leads you get from the regular emails opting will be the target of your future direct mail marketing campaign. Extract the emails and add them to your direct mail marketing workflow.
It is important to note that landing pages for direct mail are not any different from the regular landing pages. They use the same conversion optimization principles; however the tweak lies in how you use both media- direct mail and landing pages to get the most of customer conversion from multiple channels.
Making sense of direct mail automation- making it produce desired results
To combine both offline direct mail postcards with online landing pages for your marketing campaigns, you need:
- A landing page solution
- Direct mail automation program
- A marketing automation software that does the job of integrating the two
Examples of how this work:
Build your landing pages with Instapage, send postcards with Inkit, and then use Hubspot to segment your leads and automate the delivery of the postcards.
Final thought:
Using direct mails offer a wide range of possibilities. It can be synced with retargeting ads from social media, postcards can be customized to include personalized content, or even targeting high value leads with carefully curated postcard campaigns.
By doing something totally different, the simplest of automated direct mail campaigns promises to deliver great results. By using this means you no longer come off as boring to your audience thereby making your marketing drive compelling.
