Snail Mail Isn’t Dead

Thanks to the popularity of email and social media marketing, many businesses have turned their back on “old-fashioned” snail mail (direct mail) because it’s no longer seen as a useful way to reach prospects and attract new clients.

Believe it or not, snail mail isn’t dead.

In fact, it remains an excellent marketing channel — if it’s done right. In 2015, U.S advertisers spent $176 per person on direct mail to earn $2,095 worth of goods sold, representing a 1,300% return on their direct mail campaigns. The technique also holds the highest household response rate at 5.1%, compared to email (.6%), paid search (.6%), online display (0.2% and social media (0.4%).

Here are some tips to help your direct mail campaigns stand out in the digital age.

Gather Mailing Addresses; Create Look-a-Like Personas
If you have an existing mailing list for customers or members, you can skip this step. However, not all mailing lists are equal. It’s important to work with a high-quality, targeted list of prospects to ensure your direct mail campaign is a success. Work with a reputable list seller and carefully define the audience you’re trying to reach. Using any existing customer personas, create a list of lookalike personas that you could tap to bring in new clients through your direct mail campaign.

Establish a Specific Goal
Just like any marketing activity, direct mail works best when you’ve established a goal for your campaign that’s sharply defined. Design a campaign that focuses on achieving one specific and measurable goal. Doing so provides you with the best way to track your success and tweak the results for future campaigns. You can start with a small segment of a list to test the campaign and then increase it after you see how well it performs.

Segmenting Your Lists
Segmenting is a technique used to direct niche marketing messages to specific audiences. You can aim images and text to audiences that are in tune with a particular message.

WellnessLiving allows users to create custom direct mail campaigns by segmenting mailing lists into client types or groups, ensuring your campaigns are easy to develop and as targeted as possible.

What Should You Send?
In addition to automated email marketing options, WellnessLiving allows users to create customizable postcards that can be sent directly to their clients. These postcards can include any custom information related to your marketing and communications goals, such as details about a special promotion.

It’s often a good idea to add a promotion code on any marketing materials offering a special promotion as a way of keeping track of your direct mail campaign’s effectiveness.

Users can create custom templates within the WellnessLiving platform and track the costs of any new or existing direct mail campaigns. You can print on both sides as long as you leave room for addressing it.

These postcards are the most affordable type of mail to send via direct mail. They’re also an excellent opportunity to give prospects an idea of what to expect from your business, reinforces the “I belong here” feeling for existing customers and even reestablish a relationship with a past customer.

The design of any direct mail campaign should be reflective of your brand. Colours should match your brand’s color palette and fonts should match those on your website and other marketing materials. There’s no harm in designing collateral that’s seasonal, such as those celebrating holidays like Halloween (orange/black) or Christmas (red/green/white), but your brand identity must remain faithful to existing materials (logos should always stay the same color, etc.)

If you’re having trouble coming up with an idea for a template, think about past campaigns and those that worked well. You may even have to tailor designs based on a particular audience segment. Never forget that the success of your direct mail campaign depends on your ability to meet the needs of the audience segments you’re trying to reach. For example, prospects tend to respond well to photos with people in them.

Track Your Success
Direct mail is difficult to track in comparison with other digital marketing channels. You can, however, monitor direct mail campaigns by using unique promotion codes designed to prompt users to visit your website and manually enter the code to redeem an offer.

Digital marketing tools have become a go-to solution to get your brand message heard in today’s digital world. But don’t forget about snail mail. Direct mail is a proven and effective grassroots marketing technique that still has legs and can provide you with a tool to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

If you would like to talk to a WellnessLiving representative about how we can help your studio grow to success, book a free demo of the platform, or call us at 1 (888) 668-7728 Today!