February 2019

As Long as There Are Mailboxes, Direct Mail Will be Effective.

It’s a time tested, proven method that works despite being over five hundred years old. It’s true, the advent of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440 made mass production of flyers possible. As the mail systems around the world improved, so did direct mail marketing. Sears built an empire on its direct mail catalogs. In recent years Sears abandoned that model, and their business has been on the decline ever since.  

The things that made direct mail marketing a success then are still why it works today. Direct mail marketing is personalized; it is being sent directly to one person. Direct mail can be colorful and attention-grabbing.  It allows you to use your branding such as fonts, logos, and language. Not only is direct mail marketing a trusted marketing method, but it still achieves in today’s digitally dominated world. Direct mail can bypass the vast magnitudes of digital flash and noise that surrounds us.  Not only is it more effective in many ways than banner ads, pay-per-click, and SEO enhancements, but also can give you a higher return on investment. You know a customer will at least hold and look at a direct mail piece, with pay-per-click ads and search engine result pages (SERP) a customer may only glance at it for a few seconds; which brings us to our next point.

Direct Mail Marketing Last Longer Than Digital Marketing.

True, what is put on the internet stays there forever, but that does not mean people will look at it forever (unless you are a politician or celebrity who tweeted something objectionable years ago). For the rest of us, marketing campaigns on the internet disappear into the ether and are never seen again. This analogy is no exaggeration; a tweet has about 20 minutes that it will be looked at by a customer. During that 20 minutes, the numbers of views will decrease unless you are fortunate enough to be retweeted. A Facebook post last a little bit longer than a tweet, around two hours.  By contrast, a direct mail piece lasts at least 24 hours and can sit around someone’s office or home for weeks or months. It is not unusual to hear stories about customers responding to a mailing that had gone out months earlier.

Direct Mail Marketing Doesn’t get Routed to a Spam Filter.

If you have taken part in a mass marketing email blast, you know that half or more of the emails sent then wind up in a spam filter. If you are not aware of what ever-changing terms get your email sent to a spam filter, you can count on nearly all of it being routed away from inboxes. Direct mail doesn’t get sorted and put into a secondary mailbox; it goes directly to the customer’s hands. You know that a customer will at least skim the piece, as where the average customer won’t read what is in their spam filter.

It Can Drive Customers To Your Company’s Online Presence.

If you’ve spent time and effort in producing a high quality, attention-grabbing website, it means nothing if people don’t visit. You can use pay-per-click-ads to try and guide customer’s to your site, but if you don’t use just the right language, it may not work. Direct mail pieces with your company’s web address will receive organic clicks from people typing in the address on their own. Including social media addresses will also drive customers to those platforms. Make sure to have backlinks to your website in social media posts to draw attention from search engines. Even in this day and age, direct mail can enhance your online presence and SERP results.

Direct mail continues to be as effective now as in Victorian times. It will be useful for the foreseeable future because there is still a visceral advantage of the physical over the digital.