Best Practices: Ways to Make Direct and Digital Mail Work Together

Many businesses debating the kind of marketing platform to focus on often get lost with an all-or-nothing approach. They tend to either go completely with email, or if they choose direct marketing lists, to focus almost entirely on it. Both kinds of marketing platform come with their own strengths, though. It’s important to harness the energies of both for the best possible marketing penetration and advantage.

How do digital and direct marketing complement one another? 

Email marketing comes with two fundamental challenges: you need a recipient address to even get started, and recipients mostly ignore marketing email. If such email does get noticed, it often still has a hard time getting its point across, because there”s only little space, and most recipients do not trust links and attachments.

Since people tend to be exposed to much less direct mail today than in years past, it does get noticed. Even more importantly, it can be sent out without a mailing list to hundreds of recipients in any ZIP code. Direct mailing materials can be more expressive than email, as well. For instance, marketers do not even need to wait for recipients to open their envelopes. Many try printing envelopes with attractive messages front and center. As marketing outreach that recipients can touch and feel, direct mail tends to be viewed with greater trust, as well. The downside is that businesses can find it hard to reach a large number of people with it, considering the costs involved.

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What businesses need to do is to focus on blending both kinds of marketing. It can be challenging to do this though. One potential solution for a company that specialises primarily in digital marketing would be to find a direct mailing solutions company in order to utilise them as an agency of sorts, using their ability to provide direct mailing solutions to provide valuable marketing for your brand whilst you can focus time and resources on maintaining the digital side of the business. Below are some fundemental mistakes that companies make when blending marketing types and also what to do to avoid such pitfalls.

Inconsistent branding

From color scheme to tagline, call to action, and even use of language, it”s important to go with uniform style and substance from one marketing platform to another. Many businesses struggle here simply because they have different teams working on each kind of marketing campaign. Recipients who get to see both direct and email campaign materials together need to see uniformity in message and brand image; inconsistency does not go over well. A consistent image, the other hand, can strengthen belief in the brand, and can improve response rates.

A staggered campaign can be a good idea 

You wouldn”t want to send too many emails in quick succession to your mailing list for fear of being viewed a spammer. Similarly, it isn”t a good idea to send people both email and direct mail at the same time. One of the main advantages of taking different marketing routes is that you get to help with lowering marketing fatigue. Staggered marketing campaigns tend to be more effective.

Use highly relevant landing pages

While email marketing requires addresses for mailing lists, direct mail is excellent with cold calling — it can go out to people who have never established contact with the company. Direct marketing, then, can be a good way to obtain email addresses for an email campaign. One of the best ways of doing it is to include a link to the company”s website on a piece of direct mail, and build a highly relevant landing page.

The statistics prove it all

A study by Harvard Business Review has found that direct mail and email marketing, when combined, resulted in far better recipient uptake than either method on its own. These methods play to one another”s strengths, and are both components parts of any marketing campaign.