Direct Marketing Advantages: Why Direct Mail Still Works

The advantages of direct marketing over other forms of advertising are impressive. Here are some of them:

• Measure campaign performance and response
• Audience targeting with segmentation
• 1-to-1 personalization
• Improve customer loyalty
• Multiple affordable options
• Easy response
• Testing offers & creative
• Generating direct mail leads

Direct marketing is a business of acquiring customers and getting to know them, and then, continually delight them by meeting their needs and creating new wants so that they take action. It does all of this by precisely and constantly measuring successes and failures.

Benefits and Advantages of Direct Marketing

Direct marketing includes direct mail, email, digital ads, social media, telemarketing, SMS, and direct response (TV, radio, OOH). If it makes a direct call-to-action, it’s direct marketing. And fortunately, the strengths of these marketing channels combine to make campaigns more powerful. For example, direct mail and email work together in many ways.

There are many advantages to using certain direct marketing techniques, all of which apply especially well to direct mail:

Measure Campaign Performance & Response

Direct marketing is accountable marketing. It is not about awareness or brand-building, where attribution is often difficult.

Instead, direct marketing is measurable within tenths or even hundredths of a percent. Take direct mail: tracking performance and analysis is not usually difficult. If there’s not a response, you can’t measure anything. And to have a response, you need to make an explicit offer.

Audience Targeting with Segmentation

As opposed to a mass communication strategy, segmentation is one of the most powerful advantages of direct marketing. It targets specific groups of people who have something in common. The target audience data breakdown zeroes in on specific segmentation factors that are more likely to drive a successful campaign, such as geographical, demographic, behavior, and psychographic. Because direct mail and email are based in tons of data, this is a strategy that allows for many different campaigns that produce good ROI and create customers.

1-to-1 Personalization

Personalization allows companies to present consumers with more options based on their own data history and demographic profile. As a result, there are more opportunities for them to create customized touchpoints for customers, whether as charts, images, maps, headlines (or subject lines), or offers. Variable data printing (VDP) puts that 1-to-1 marketing to work on a printed direct mail piece, promotional item, or advertising collateral.

Besides supporting retargeting and programmatic efforts, It also gives marketers a better chance to improve their marketing through improved modeling and more effective testing of offers and creative elements.

Improve Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is about more than emphasizing customer service. It also goes beyond any special recognition, like a rewards program.

Loyalty is a full-on dedication to customer delight, by continually responding to changes in customer preferences and demand by offering new products and services. Without any proactive notice, customers will tell you what they want as well as need through their purchases in any channel as well as their online browsing behavior. To keep your brand top of mind to your customers, you must always look at your RFM data for trends, even for just one customer, to ensure loyalty and build your relationship.

Multiple Affordable Options

Cost-effectiveness is usually seen as a big advantage of email. It’s considered a low or even “free” channel. Statistics tell a different story, however. They show that email open and click-through rates are low. That’s OK if you get good ROI on a campaign. But there are always prospects you miss or fail to retain. As already noted, opportunities exist to run campaigns consisting of several channels – both online and offline – to draw the attention of your prospects or customers and keep them engaged.

Easy Response

Response is the goal of direct marketing strategy. We see or hear hundreds of messages of every kind every day. However, if those communications, no matter how persuasive, contain no response device. There is no simple way to determine if or how a specific ad or promotion succeeds in prompting an action, such as buying a product or service. Even impressions that are created are not an exact measurement.

With direct marketing, attribution allows calculation of response rates, ROI, and other measurements of success. As long as the marketer (or non-profit) tracks the response, that is.

Testing Offers & Creative

Direct marketing thrives on the constant testing of various elements of a message to improve response. In email, common testing includes subject lines, offers, and images. Direct mail testing, for example, centers on copy, pricing, and formats , among other things. Testing is especially important because it provides an opportunity to roll out new products, services, or messaging in secret. This process also saves making expensive mistakes later.

Generating Direct Mail Leads

You can use direct marketing as already mentioned above to segment audiences and target individuals, but for the purpose of generating direct mail leads. A prospect who receives a postcard or an email, for example, visits a landing page where they can supply more detailed information for sales force outreach.

How to Make Direct Marketing Work for You in 2024 and Beyond

With direct marketing, you have many opportunities to connect with an audience by getting inside the head and under the skin of your customers. Here at mailing.com, we have many years of experience in working with companies of all sizes to make the advantages of direct marketing work for them.

Call or reach out to us today to get started on your marketing campaigns!