Why Direct Mail Is Far From Dead–and How You Can Use It in Your Marketing

When marketing an online store, business owners often turn to digital channels, like social media or email marketing. Surprisingly, some marketing techniques considered outdated can be just as effective as digital marketing methods.

Given today’s oversaturated nature of digital advertising, business owners need to explore new ways of marketing their products and services… Or not so new. That’s why we invited David Fink of Postie to be a guest on our podcast and discuss the possibilities of direct mail marketing.

Direct Mail for Marketing

Marketing is an omnichannel game. When you use different channels, it helps you grow your business more predictably and with more confidence.

Postie is a channel management technology platform for the direct mail space. Think of it as a Facebook Ad Manager for your direct mail campaigns.

Postie’s founders ported over 20 years of knowledge in online ad serving and marketing automation. They have built a platform to allow advertisers to engage with the direct mail channel in the same sophisticated automated way as a digital ad channel.

Targeting with Direct Mail

EDDM, or Every Door Direct Mail, is an inexpensive way to reach individuals through the mail in a very non-personalized, non-targeted way. However, targeting and personalizing according to your audience results in better performance, even if it costs a bit more.

In digital advertising, smart targeting has been game-changing. While you might need to spend a little more than normal, smart targeting uses segmentation and predictive mathematics to create a target population based on previous customers, or lookalike audiences. This eliminates a lot of the waste caused by sending advertisements to uninterested parties. Smart targeting can also help you understand who you’re engaging. Postie brings those game-changing possibilities to direct mail.

Direct Mail Execution

If you run direct mail with a traditional provider, it can take 60-90 days from the time that you have an idea for a direct mail marketing initiative to when your mail actually reaches potential customers.

Postie makes it possible to execute direct mail marketing initiatives in real-time (or as close to real-time as possible). They do so by using dashboards and software instead of phones and in-person meetings.

Measuring Direct Mail Performance

If you’re allocating a budget to execute a specific strategy that may drive a performance goal, you need to know if it worked so you can improve your marketing strategy moving forward.

If you’re capturing address data at the transaction point through your website, your mobile app, or POS, you can match that data to a person’s mailing addresses, at least during that time period. With Postie, that process can be automated to make it easier to reach interested parties or previous customers.

The Importance of Analyzing Your Audience

Whether you’re a late-stage successful business, or you’re just getting started, you should learn everything you can about your current and prospective customers. The more you can gain insights into the differences that make up those two groups of individuals, the better you understand what resonates with certain groups.

Once you understand that, then you can start thinking about how to communicate better through your ads and creatives. Then you can start thinking about what data sources and media channels allow you to reach more people within your data-backed target audience.

In the episode, we discuss the ways you can use direct mail to gain more insight into your audience, as well as use it for promoting your product and services. Tune in to learn more about this often-overlooked form of marketing.