What is Direct Mail Retargeting & How to Utilize It

For marketers who want to bring the best of the digital and physical worlds together, direct mail retargeting offers a powerful way to connect with consumers. It works by matching the IP addresses of visitors to your website with physical addresses – ones that you can then target with a mailed offer.

While digital alone has transformed how to communicate with customers, mail offers an added advantage: the ability to engage senses such as touch. Studies show that connecting with a message on a physical level creates a strong emotional bond with customers and leads to longer brand recall.

Let’s look a little closer at the value of direct mail retargeting.

When to Use Retargeting

According to Marketo, 96% of visitors to a business’ website are not ready to make a purchase when they arrive on that page. Regardless of what brought them there – a Google search, an ad, a social media post, a past purchase, etc. – they are probably just browsing. Or maybe they’re up near the top of the sales funnel, simply gathering information before deciding what they should buy, and from whom.

While marketers have responded by using digital retargeting, such as banner ads, shoppers are increasingly ignoring them, or installing ad blocker software to do the job for them. In addition, the average digital retargeted ad click-through rate (CTR) is 0.7%.

All of this means that there’s a gigantic need for better ways to convert these website visitors.

With retargeting, you can turn these tire-kickers into direct mail leads with a targeted printed piece.

How to Use Retargeting

Certain types of customer behavior at a website are opportunities to trigger the sending of a retargeted direct mail piece. For example:

• browsing on your homepage
• returning as a past customer who hasn’t responded to a win-back campaign
• recently signing up for your email list
• viewing individual product or service pages
• downloading a document (e.g., PDF, infographic, or other content) without completing a form
• abandoning a shopping cart
• visiting pages with information on brick-and-mortar physical store locations

The web pages that each prospect visits indicate where they are in the buying process. For each (if you’d like), you can set up a trigger for a specific direct mail piece that gets printed and mailed to the prospect.

How granular you want to get with this mailer is up to you and your strategy. But it could include more than a special offer or incentive, such as variable content that will be relevant to them, based on their action on your site, as well as possible segmentation factors.

Benefits of Retargeting

Direct mail retargeting can be a valuable part of your overall marketing strategy because of how it benefits customers both in digital and print channels.

Here are few reasons why retargeting with direct mail can assist your marketing strategy:

• Develop leads for further efforts through direct mail and potentially other channels
• Build a deeper connection with customers through a printed mail piece
• Supplement online marketing with an economical format, such as a postcard
• Increase your brand awareness versus competitors who stick to digital-only
• Test offers and pricing tactics for your offline marketing
• Learn more about pain points in your website’s pricing or copy, as well as other elements that put an obstacle in the way of customers ordering from you.

Wrapping it up

As a physical medium, direct mail has long relied on making an impression on customers all by itself. But with retargeting, it benefits from tearing down the silos between the digital and print worlds. Now, you can use the power of print to set your brand apart from your digital-only competition by sending them a target mail piece.

At mailing.com, our data management and mailing services teams would be happy to talk with you about how to plan direct mail campaigns that retarget customers. Drop us a line or call us!