When marketing a product or service, reaching out to potential customers in any way possible will undoubtedly increase traffic and improve conversion rates. E-mail marketing is one way of reaching out to potential customers that frequent your website. However, regular direct mail still exists and can be leveraged to build and expand your customer base. Programmatic direct mail is a form of automated marketing that sends direct mail to undisclosed visitors to a website.
How Programmatic Direct Mail Works
Programmatic direct mail distribution is an automated way of tracking the locations of visitors to your website after they have searched your site for your product or service. Traditionally, business owners can collect potential customers’ contact information through an online form on your website, but there are other ways of doing this.
Sometimes, potential customers might provide you with incomplete or wrong information bits that prevent you from successfully contacting them through email or phone. However, by reverse appending incomplete data, you can bridge this gap.
Data appending is a way of finding this missing information by way of the internet protocol (IP) address of such visitors to your website. For example, you might have a potential customer’s phone number, but their email address was incorrect when your email marketing software attempted to send them emails.
In general, data appending is a process that involves adding new data to already existing data by matching it to a larger database of business data. Reverse appending the IP address to their household address gives you the option of sending mail directly to their door. Even in today’s fast-paced digital world, most people are likely to check their mail regularly.
Forms of Direct Mail to Send
Once the individual’s address has been captured through reverse data appending, various forms of direct mail can then be sent to them. These could include handwritten messages, typed notes, flyers, postcards concerning upcoming events, and other kinds of direct mail.
These would be appropriate for people who already know your business exists and what it has to offer. There is no need to feel that you are imposing on their privacy since they have shown interest in the goods and/or services you offer by having visited your website multiple times.
More Effective Than Online Ad Placements
If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of direct mail marketing, there isn’t any reason to. Millennials are the newest generation of consumers and they are the ones you need to target the most often.
There is plenty of evidence to show that, despite what most marketers think, members of this generation are highly likely to respond to direct marketing ads. According to data gathered by the United States Postal Service (USPS), 84% of young people take the time to look through their physical mail. 64% of young people prefer to scan their physical mail for useful information than their emails.
Additionally, Millennials are less likely than non-Millenials to throw away any of their mail without reading it first. They are 40% more likely to sort through and organize their mail than non-Millenials are. Best of all, they are 24% more likely to show their mail to others in their age group, and this can mean serious profits if you market to them using the right strategies.
You don’t have to worry about grabbing the attention of older folks with your direct marketing efforts. Older generations have been trained since they were young to look through their daily physical mail for offers that seem worthwhile.
The Brain’s Response to Print Versus Digital Ads
The brain responds differently to digital ads than it does to print ads. For instance, the brain takes time to absorb print ads, while processing the information from digital ads pretty fast. As a result, there is more of an emotional appeal to print ads than there are to digital ads.
This is because of the part of the brain that deals with desirability and value is strongly affected by print ads, and not so much to digital ads. The brain is generally wired to respond more positively to print ads than to digital ads, even in people who spend most of their time online, as Millenials do.
Nobody is suggesting that, as a marketer, you suspend your online marketing campaigns; quite the opposite is true. However, if you don’t utilize direct mail as a way of getting the word out about your business, your business simply won’t grow the way it could have.
