Even in this digital age, direct mail is proving more and more relevant for building the foundation of a meaningful relationship. The last few years have been the hey day for e-commerce, we all lived it and brands are pushing to create meaningful engagements with consumers in a competitive e-commerce market. Consumer expectations are set to favour brands who make them feel like an individual with a whopping 84% saying the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
Let’s break down 5 ways direct mail marketing is helping brands thrive in 2023:
1. Re-engage Inactive Subscribers
No software update will be taking your hard-earned data list! Brands are treasuring their email lists and finding a new way to re-engage inactive subscribers. It’s well known that acquiring new customers is more expensive than keeping them, so shifting ignored email campaigns to creative, physical mail is a winning strategy to capture attention and re-engage existing customers to strengthen loyalty.
2. Influence a Higher Brand Recall
A study concluded EditSign that direct mail requires 21% less cognitive effort to process and elicits a higher brand recall than digital media (email on laptop & smart phone as well as a display ad on laptop & smart phone). It was found that consumers interact with mail and absorb content in a largely unconscious way, and more strongly than other media, activates areas of the brain that are responsible for long-term memory encoding. This supports the findings that 60% of respondents claimed direct mail keeps a brand top of mind and has a lasting effect so that recall will be more readily triggered later on.
Digital printing technologies have leapt forward with all other tech to deliver on demand, high quality, digital prints that provide an impressive, tangible experience that can be shared. Finally, design teams are only limited by their imagination!
3. Standing Out in a 'Sea of Sameness'
Close your eyes and imagine your email inbox. Do that again and imagine the contents of your letter box. Enough said. Right now, diversifying communications to hit uncluttered letter boxes is helping brands cut through stand out in what has become a sea of sameness.
4. Offline Experience
85% of consumers expect and appreciate a blend of digital and physical engagements from brands. Direct mail allows brands to satisfy customer preference while delivering a highly personalised one-to-one communication that is hard to replicate online. Unifying online and offline marketing strategies is critical to success so all efforts should use a consistent design across platforms and work together to get more attention, thereby increasing your results.
5. Strengthen Brand Trust
As digital saturation grows, marketing channels such as direct mail are enjoying higher consumer trust. Fake news, intrusive online ads, frequent malware, cyber-attacks and software updates like iOS14 that are forcing change in some areas just heighten the distrust that is observed online. Royal Mail MarketReach revealed that while 87% of people consider printed mail to be believable, only 48% say the same for email.
Brands with particularly emotive, deep stories to tell benefit by sharing more information via this printed media. We see Charities in particular, share in depth stories with their audience to effectively motivate donations in fundraising campaigns mailed across New Zealand.
The ideal solution for brands in 2023 is to rely on hard-earned, owned data and utilise a mix of online and offline marketing strategies to stand out in a sea of sameness, build trust and strengthen customer loyalty. Over the coming years, we expect to see direct mail marketing strategies that burst through the digital noise become increasingly essential.