They say that direct mail marketing is dead. But naysayers should prepare for some surprise. Experts project this aging method of business marketing will grow by over $1 billion.
In short, sending your customers paper advertisements is far from dead. On the contrary, a direct mail marketing strategy will increase your company’s reach and scale. And yet after a look at your mailbox, you might be in doubt.
We’re here to change your mind. We’ve got 12 reasons we’re sure will convince you to make your own direct mail marketing plan. Join us as we discuss why snail mail is an excellent strategy in 2022.
1. Direct Mail Marketing Caters to the Elderly Population
It’s easy to forget about our old folks. An estimated 55 million Americans are at retirement age. That makes up 16% of the population or one in seven people in America.
Retired folks are not a market that you want to forget about. They have a lot of free time, and many of them have a comfortable stream of retirement money. In some aspects, they are the perfect target demographic for company marketing.
Problem is, many of these old folks are allergic to technology. Studies have shown that a third of the elderly population needs help setting up electronic devices. That means that any of your online marketing strategies likely won’t reach them.
It’s extremely important that you keep and maintain your online business marketing. SEO marketing and targeted advertising are as important as ever. But don’t neglect the 16% of your customer base that prefers letters in the mailbox.
Sending post means you’re guaranteed to connect with retired folks. They come from a different generation when that was the standard means of correspondence. By catering to this demographic, you might just beat out the competition that ignores them.
2. It Reaches All the Households in Your Service Area
Often, your services are localized and personal. You only want to advertise to a certain city or neighborhood. This is your customer base, and any effort put outside your service area would be wasted.
While there are options to target these areas, there’s no guarantee your words will reach them. Targeted advertising can hone in on IP addresses and geo-fenced areas. But all of that goes to waste if your customers skip ads or use an adblocker.
So why not deliver it straight to their doorstep? There’s no adblocker or ad skip option they can use then.
You can arrange to send post to everyone who’s in your area with ease. Of course, they can throw the letters out. But it’s a guaranteed chance that they’ll see it before they do.
Plus, paper sticks around. Someone can delete an email and forget about it forever. But until you shred up the paper, it’s there as an advertisement for your company right up until they trash it.
3. It Appeals to the Human Senses
When authors are learning how to craft novels, they often get this advice: focus on the senses. Telling people how others are feeling creates distance and alienation. But describing a character’s senses pulls the reader into the story.
In a similar vein, you should engage your audience’s senses. What better way to appeal to the senses than with a physical advertisement?
A digital advertisement can only activate two senses: eyesight and sound. That means it’s easy for your advertisement to get lost in the midst of others that are identical to it. Paper, on the other hand, engages all the senses.
Paper feels good to hold in your hands. It crinkles and crumbles. And people love the smell of new paper.
After a potential customer sees your advertisement, they might even lick the adhesive when sending back the included envelope. In one fell swoop, you’ve engaged all the senses.
4. It’s More Personal
Everyone fantasizes about receiving love letters through the post. There’s something special about two humans connecting over long distances with the written word. A physical advertisement can evoke something similar.
Compare this to a digital advertisement, served to thousands during the same Hulu episode. It doesn’t ring the same. It’s a soulless invitation to any and all interested.
People have become jaded with the internet. They’re tired of the scam messages, the generic coupons, and the auto-generated marketing emails. They want something real, something that feels like people recognize them for who they are.
Even if you’re sending the same mass-marketing letter, people still feel like it’s personal. After all, it has their name and address. That means a lot more than scraping someone’s email from a leaked email list.
Globalization and social media make it harder and harder for people to get recognition. Appeal to that deficiency that they feel, and you’ve hit a gold mine.
5. It Shows That You Put in Effort
Digital advertising is cheap. Clicks can cost less than a cent, and the wattage to power a digital advertisement is even less. The ability to churn out these ads only cheapens the effect further.
Paper costs money, and so does the effort to print it. Add in a solid flyer design, and it’s clear to a recipient the lengths you’ve gone to.
Customers don’t have to think hard to realize that’s not the end of it. Postage costs money. It takes a lot of logistics and time to ensure your letter reaches their mailbox.
Effort strengthens your image as a company. It shows that you’re not going for maximum profit with minimal effort. It’s proof that you’ve invested in a potential customer before they have committed.
Customers don’t want to feel like just another number on your spreadsheets. The more they feel like they’re worth your time and effort, the better customers they’ll be.
6. It Feels More Formal
Despite the explosion of smartphone usage, many invitations remain physical. Wedding invitations, graduation invitations, and more. In the same way, a physical letter invokes that sense of formality.
A physical letter hits differently than a mass email. As we’ve mentioned, it’s personalized. It feels like you’re extending a gracious formal invitation to your customers.
Formality makes people feel like they’re worth more. It’s almost as if you’re treating them like royalty. Customers that feel like they really matter to you are customers that will stick around in the long term.
7. It Gives the Impression of Trustworthiness
Everyone’s heard the tales of scam emails that make the rounds. Nigerian princes begging the recipient to accept their inheritance of millions in diamonds. Add in the abundance of phishing emails, and the medium becomes inherently less trustworthy.
These days, an email does not inspire confidence in your brand. But a physical letter? That sends a different message entirely.
Formal letters feel more trustworthy with good reason. If someone was scamming you via mail, that would put them in peril of legal action.
Compare this to email, where the sender could use an anonymous burner email address. If the authorities come, that sender could disappear into the depths of the internet.
Letters tell your clients that you’re the real deal. They establish your brand and show that you have the finances to promote yourself. It’s a win all around and avoids the stigma of email.
8. It Gives You More Chances for Creativity
There’s only so much you can do with a digital advertisement. You can have flashy colors, or play sounds. But at the end of the day, it’s only a few pixels on a screen.
Bring things into the physical realm, and you have more chances to experiment. It loosens the limitations on your creativity in terms of company marketing.
You can send flyers, cute postcards, or perforated coupon sheets. The sky is the limit here. Take the chance to create a memorable advertisement that customers won’t forget.
9. It Creates Anticipation and Surprise
A letter is a black box. It may have your company’s name on the outside as well as a printed envelope, but customers don’t know what’s inside. That plays into human psychology and piques their curiosity.
We humans are curious creatures. We want to know what’s in that box, or what’s behind that door. We can drive ourselves crazy just imagining what secrets might be hidden somewhere.
Unlike an email, there’s no way to peek inside a letter before you open it. It necessitates the recipient to get the letter opener and solve the mystery.
The experience of opening post is something humans will never fall out of love for. It’s an experience from beginning to end. As they tear open the lip of the envelope, they’re thinking of what they might find inside.
Then they have to pull out the contents and fold them open. If you’ve had your creative team working hard, this could be a chance to wow them. A surprise that pays off is an advertisement that’s guaranteed to stick.
10. It’s Easier to Measure Than Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can be a chore and a half. Analytics inundate you with countless metrics. You have post engagement, click-through rate, customer conversion, and so many more.
While this breadth of information is certainly useful, it complicates what could be a simple matter. And that’s what direct mail marketing can do.
With a direct mail marketing strategy, you know exactly how effective it is. Whether it’s return envelopes or redeemed coupons, you have a solid number of how many customers respond. There’s no sweating over post engagement.
Plus, printing en masse is affordable. You can ramp up your marketing post or slow it down as needed. It’s very easy to scale as your needs change.
11. It’s Relatively Easy to Produce
A digital campaign takes a lot of work. Making the advertisements themselves might just be the easy part.
You have to choose an ad network. Then you have to strategize which websites will display your ads. You have to choose a scheme for how you’ll pay for ads.
Then you have to spend countless hours analyzing the metrics to know if it’s effective. After that, it’s back to the drawing board to renovate your campaign for the next season.
With direct mail marketing, you just print the letters and send them. If the letters aren’t having as much of an effect, then you change the advertisement and send them again.
12. It Streamlines Communication With Existing Customers
Sending direct mail marketing helps you to keep track of existing customers. Since you’re delivering letters to their home, you know they’ll get it. And if they leave, new tenants will relay it to their new address.
This allows you to target your existing customers with retention bonuses. You can offer them new deals or upgrades that are exclusive through snail mail.
Don’t forget what we’ve mentioned earlier in this article. Letters feel formal, personal, and demonstrate effort on your part. They show your customers you care in ways that digital company marketing cannot.
Direct mail marketing might feel antiquated, but it demonstrates respect for your roots. Much of your customer base remembers the days when letters were the standard for ads. They’ll appreciate that you give them a taste of the way things used to be.
Find a One-Stop Shop for All Your Printing Needs
Direct mail marketing may seem like it’s on its way out the door, but statistics don’t substantiate that belief. There are plenty of benefits to having a direct mail marketing strategy. It allows you to personalize your advertisements, reach more of your audience, and simplify your operations.
Now that you’re looking to make a direct mail marketing plan, you need a printer. Look no further than Catdi printing services. Find a wide variety of options to suit your printing needs.
