Average conversion rates of 4% and the ability to reach almost the entire customer base make postal mailings a particularly attractive marketing channel, especially for advertising existing customers. With a market volume of around EUR 9 billion in Germany alone (online marketing expenditure also around EUR 9 billion) and EUR 40 billion in Europe, it is clear that even in the digital age, this channel has enormous relevance for a successful marketing mix.

However, in order to achieve profitable results with letters, postcards, self-mailers and the like, a systematic approach is indispensable. Just as in online marketing, the more systematically you approach customers, the higher the conversion rate. Without an intelligent tool, however, the mailing process is very cumbersome and possible potential is not realised. Incidentally, this is nothing new in email marketing – because numerous tools are also used for successful email campaigns. But if postal mailing campaigns are implemented manually, conversion-driving personalization processes and the chance for real cross-channel marketing often fall by the wayside. The effort involved is usually too great.

This is now a thing of the past – optilyz is the first platform in Europe that enables you to operate postal mailings just as systematically as online channels. With our solution you increase the conversion rates of your letters, postcards and the like, by 30-70% and at the same time reduce the manual effort by up to 80%. The following article shows exactly where the advantages of our tool for postal mailings lie.

Book new campaigns in a few clicks

Thanks to optilyz we were able to optimise our direct mailings and achieve incremental sales. Both the CRM measures and the content marketing campaigns are well received by our customers and are a valuable addition to our online strategy.

Christine Detzkeit, Head of Online Sales, AmbienteDirect

Thanks to the simple booking process, you can book new mailing campaigns in just a few clicks. It doesn’t matter whether you just want to send a postcard or complex letters consisting of various enclosures. With optilyz you can even send your mailings throughout Europe without any additional effort. Simply upload your addresses, designs and voucher codes to the optilyz platform. Thanks to this intuitive and user-friendly setup process, you can create new campaigns in under three minutes. You can keep an eye on the costs at all times. Time-consuming coordination of different service providers is a thing of the past. optilyz is your all-in-one platform – from booking to dispatch. Benefit from consistently high quality standards and continuous price transparency.

Practical example

As the operator of an online shop for dietary supplements, you want to promote the introduction of your own brand for protein powder. The purchase history of your customers shows which customers regularly buy protein powder. Finally, you create a target group of 15,000 addressees. You decide to send this group a personalised postcard with the following message: “Try some of our products! Here’s your exclusive 30% discount on the next order of our private label.” Since you can load the address data, designs and voucher codes directly onto the optilyz platform, you can book this single campaign in a few minutes.

Increase the quality of your address data free of charge

The holistic approach of the optilyz platform significantly reduces our operating expenses.

Jan Meißner, Marketing Manager, Hoesch&Partner

We know from experience that about 6% of the addresses used are undeliverable. To avoid unnecessary costs for production and unsuccessful delivery, the optilyz platform offers an integrated data cleansing feature. Your address data is automatically checked and cleansed for the following information during transmission:

• Incorrect addresses are corrected

Your addresses are automatically corrected by our system and converted into a standardized format to increase the delivery rate.

• Invalid addresses are sorted out

Addresses that cannot be corrected or have an invalid addressee are automatically sorted out. Costs for unsuccessful deliveries are thus minimized.

• Duplicates are cleaned up

To further increase the integrity of your data, we clean all duplicates. Multiple deliveries are thus eliminated.

After the verification is completed, the cleaned address file is made available for download so that you can sustainably increase the quality of your customer database. You benefit from this feature completely free of charge and risk-free. Our customers thus reduce campaign costs by up to 8% and increase conversion rates by up to 12%.

Practical example

To book a mailing campaign, simply transfer your address data to the platform. During the transfer, our system checks your addresses. Afterwards, the system shows you that about 7% of the addresses have been corrected and about 4% have been removed. Thanks to the resulting increased delivery rate, the conversion rate has increased significantly. You have also saved a lot of money thanks to the deleted incorrect addresses. You can then import the corrected address file into your system to sustainably increase the quality of your database.

Benefit from secure data transfers

The activation of our customers is an important part of the customer life cycle. Thanks to the simple and secure use of optilyz, we can address our customers almost effortlessly with maximally relevant mailings at specific times and thus activate them much better. The platform fully complies with our data protection regulations.

Maximilian Nageler, Business Development, Coup

With the optilyz platform, you no longer need any complicated communication channels to send your address lists. Simply upload your address data encrypted in CSV format to the platform. Our mapping feature automatically adapts to your data structure. So you can start immediately without having to do any complex formatting beforehand. The comprehensive data protection guarantees the security of your data at all times. optilyz temporarily hosts all data on certified European servers and deletes them completely after the campaign is completed.

Practical example

You can book a new mailing campaign simply by uploading your address lists, designs and voucher codes directly onto the platform. Cumbersome communication channels and additional waiting times are eliminated, so you can book your campaign in just a few minutes. Thanks to the extensive data protection on the platform, all your documents are always secure.

Send your mailings in maximum segmentation

As the best tool in Europe for automating mailing campaigns, optilyz enables us to implement even highly segmented campaigns with minimal effort.

Dr. Florian Bonnet, Global Head of CRM, HelloFresh

The times of generalised mass mailings are over – with the optilyz platform you can easily use important customer segments for your mailing campaigns. Send letters, postcards, self-mailers and the like with relevant content to predefined target groups to tap the maximum potential of your mailing campaigns. You can also personalise your mailings extensively. To do this, upload the relevant address lists and designs to the platform. You can then create one segment per address list. Within the campaign, you then assign designs and texts to the segments with which the respective target group is to be addressed. In this way, you can easily pick up on certain articles and products that customers have viewed frequently or recently in your shop, for example. The result is that you can reach your customers with maximum relevant content without any effort. This way you motivate your customers to buy much better and your mailings achieve 30-70% increased conversion rates.

Practical example

As the operator of an online shop for lifestyle and health themes, you want to run a postcard campaign for your New Year’s products at the beginning of the year. Your customer database will show who lives in a single household and who lives in a family household. So you create two segments: segment A contains all singles and segment B all families with high customer value. So you decide on two designs. Design A shows a person on the sofa with a cup of tea in their hand. Design B shows a happy family playing games. The personal message A is: “Exclusive for you. Your personal discount of 20% on the next order of our New Year’s products.” Message B is: “Exclusively for you and your loved ones. Your personal discount of 20% on the next order of our New Year’s products”.

Automate recurring mailing campaigns

Thanks to the integration of optilyz […], our reactivation campaigns by letter now run as fully automated as our email campaigns. This saves us a lot of time and costs.

Christian Efendic, Team Lead CRM, Contorion

By connecting optilyz to your database, CRM system or marketing cloud, recurring campaigns can be easily automated. In this way you always address your customers at the right time with maximally relevant mailings. For example, congratulate your most loyal customers on their birthday with a personalised birthday card, welcome new customers with a high-quality mailing or make postal offers on products customers have already been informed about. You can automatically control the mailing on certain dates (e.g.: first of the month, always Wednesdays, etc.) or when a certain number of recipients is reached (e.g. 5000 recipients in this segment). Thanks to optilyz, your mailing campaigns then run just as automatically as your online channels, leaving you much more time for your core business.

Practical example

You want to congratulate your high value customers on their birthday with a personalized greeting card. It is important to you that these cards are delivered as soon as possible on your customers’ birthday. What used to be possible only with a lot of manual effort, you can now do completely automatically thanks to optilyz. The optilyz integration allows you to define the first Monday of the respective birthday week as trigger, so that the greeting cards are sent automatically and always reach the customers on time. Thanks to optilyz, your automated mailings are an effective customer loyalty campaign.

Integrate your mailings into customer journeys

optilyz has enabled us to add an individualised and scalable touchpoint to our customer communication. The platform offers a variety of functionalities that have a very positive effect on the efficiency of the channel.

Benedikt Franke, Managing Director, Helpling

With optilyz integration you can easily add automated print touchpoints to your customer journeys. Automatically use letters, postcards and the like for your reactivation sequences to reactivate valuable customers. For example, send an email in the first two steps. If there is no response, send your high value customers a personalized mailing in the last step to motivate them to buy after all. Personalized direct mailings are an efficient way of addressing customers who are not responding well to your online channels or who cannot be addressed by email due to a lack of opt-in. Thanks to optilyz, you can use the advantages of the postal channel automatically and without additional effort for a balanced and profitable cross-channel marketing. By optimally matching postal mailings with online channels, our customer HelloFresh was able to increase its return on investment by 130%!

Practical example

You plan to reactivate your high value customers with a cross-channel campaign. You decide on a sequence of three steps. In the first step, you send an email after four weeks of inactivity. After two more weeks of no response, you send another email. After another four weeks of inactivity, you send personalized letters with exclusive incentives and maximum relevant content. Thanks to the optilyz integration into your marketing cloud, the personalized letters are integrated into the customer journey as automated print touchpoints and are therefore sent according to the sequence without additional effort.

Increase the success of future mailing campaigns

With optilyz we were able to easily reach the right target groups with the right content at the best possible time. This increased the conversion rate of our offline mailings by more than 200%. In order to use and maximise this potential in the long term, we rely on optilyz as an online management platform for addressed offline mailings.

Daniel Preuß, CRM Manager, nu3

Perform A/B tests for visual language, slogans, incentives and formats on the optilyz platform without additional effort to dramatically increase the success of future mailing campaigns. Using e.g. individualised voucher codes, the redemption behaviour of customers is documented. In the analytics area of the platform, the results are then visualized in just a few clicks. Thanks to optilyz, you benefit from better analyses that show you the campaign success at a glance and identify possible optimisation potential. Use this information to optimize future campaigns and achieve the best possible conversion rates.

Practical example

As the operator of an online shop for pet supplies, you want to increase the success of future mailing campaigns. So you conduct an A/B test on the optilyz platform for the visual language of your postcards. To ensure that the result has sufficient statistical significance, you define a target group of 20,000 recipients and divide it into two groups A and B with 10,000 recipients each. An individualized voucher code is assigned to each recipient. Design A shows a product image with high-quality pet food and Design B shows a mood image with happy people and their animals. In the Analytics section of the platform you can track the redemption behaviour of the customers. At the end of the campaign, you determine the conversion rate, CPO and average shopping basket to identify the success of each design without effort. With the knowledge gained, you can increase the conversion rates of your future mailing campaigns by 30-70%.

Contact us today!

Do you want to use letters, postcards and the like, like the most innovative companies in Europe in marketing to reduce the effort and increase the advertising success? Then contact us today so that we can arrange a first meeting. We would be happy to introduce you to our platform during a free and non-binding presentation. During the exchange we will discuss together the ideal use case for your first test run.