With a big focus on digital marketing, it’s easy to forget about direct mail marketing and print marketing materials. Often overlooked, direct mail marketing still provides numerous benefits for businesses in terms of advertising and driving sales and is a prominent part of their overall marketing strategy.
Direct mail marketing continues to be a proven way to reach new and existing customers and can be a good return on investment for many businesses across various sectors. If you’re wondering how direct mail marketing could help your business, keep reading. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the benefits of direct mail marketing.
What does direct mail marketing mean?
Direct mail marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on sending physical promotional, advertorial and marketing material directly to existing or prospective customers via post. These materials could consist of flyers, packages, postcards, brochures, letters, catalogues or something completely bespoke. Messaging could be about new products or services, a business update or a promotional offer and can be targeted to specific demographics. It is usually personalised and relevant to each direct mail receiver and can be an effective way to drive brand awareness, revenue or generate leads.
What is the aim of direct mail marketing?
The main aim of direct mail marketing is to reach current or potential customers with a brand message, whether that be promotional or informative. Whatever the business objective, direct mail marketing can be tailored to get the required results.
What are the benefits of direct mail marketing?
There are several benefits of direct mail marketing that businesses and organisations can experience, especially when working in collaboration with a mailing house.
Specific Targeting
A major benefit of direct mail marketing is the ability to hone in on a specific demographic and target them with a marketing message. This, therefore, allows businesses to tailor their messaging for different consumer groups, based on their geographic location, age, gender, purchasing behaviour and any other customer data they hold. With direct mail marketing, businesses can therefore increase the probability of their marketing message getting in front of the right people, leading to higher response rates.
Tangible
Direct mail marketing provides the target audience with a real-life, tangible product, unlike the digital marketing equivalent such as an email. A tangible product that consumers can touch, interact and engage with has proven to have a more meaningful and therefore memorable impact on the receiver than a digital message. This then leads to a stronger relationship and alliance between a customer and a business. The longevity of direct mail is also much longer than an email campaign, with research finding that a personalised mailer is read and re-read an average of 4.5 times.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a major benefit of direct mail marketing. It provides the ability to personalise and tailor each mailer to the recipient using the consumer’s name, address, buying history or any other customer data a business may have on its audience. Personalisation has been proven to improve engagement and memorability with a consumer, which supports overall alliance with a company and ultimately, drives sales. Research shows that personalised mail is 35% more likely to drive a sale than unaddressed mail.
Cost-Effective
Direct mail marketing can also be a cost-effective method of marketing and advertising, which is a great benefit to businesses. Printing and postage are likely to be the biggest costs, but the size and scale of the direct mail campaign can be easily controlled to fit a budget. The return on investment (ROI) for a direct mail campaign can also be much higher than those of digital marketing, making it a worthwhile and rewarding marketing activity.
Better Response Rates
Direct mail marketing can produce some great response rates and is generally considered to be a good ROI. Due to the material being personalised and highly targeted, as well as being a tangible and engaging piece of marketing with sound longevity, receivers feel special and valued by the business. In fact, research shows that 70% of mail makes people feel valued, rather than email. All these factors contribute to better response rates.
Strong Open & Read Rates
The open and read rates of direct mail are also much higher than those of digital marketing efforts, such as email marketing. Consumers receive multiple marketing emails per day and the majority aren’t read or are instantly deleted. In comparison, physical mail can’t be instantaneously deleted. It must be picked up and it’s been found that 94% of advertising mail is engaged with and only 6% discarded or unopened.
Helps Build Consumer Trust
87% of people consider mail to be believable compared to 48% of email. There is therefore more consumer trust found in direct mail and factors such as personalisation all contribute to building a strong business-to-consumer relationship.
Compliments Other Marketing Efforts
Direct mail marketing can be extremely effective when used in addition to other marketing efforts. An omnichannel approach that combines both offline and online marketing in terms of a direct mail and digital campaign via email and social media, can successfully provide a 360-degree approach that converts strong results.
Measurable
Many people often think direct mail is not as measurable as digital marketing campaigns. However, various strategies can help to measure the success of direct mail marketing. These include using unique promotional codes or offers within the mailer if you wish to track sales, or if you use a professional mailing house, they will be able to track and measure the deliverability of your direct mail. This measurability allows businesses to continue to tweak and adjust their campaigns so that they can improve their results and reach their audience effectively.
Is direct mail marketing more effective than digital marketing?
It’s important to realise that direct mail marketing and digital marketing are different marketing strategies and shouldn’t be directly compared. One can not replace the other and for a successful marketing campaign, should be used in tandem to create a holistic approach that targets existing or prospective customers both offline and online. Direct mail marketing is definitely a channel that shouldn’t be overlooked as it can provide a number of benefits to a business to ultimately increase its reach, improve brand trust and drive sales.
Direct Mail Marketing with a Mailing House
At Direct Mail Services, we provide a comprehensive selection of services that help businesses and organisations achieve successful direct mail marketing campaigns from printing through to delivery. We use the latest technologies and equipment to create high-quality and effective direct mail for our clients and can accommodate low to high volumes.
Get in touch with us today to get started. Call us on 0117 934 1600 or email us at