E-mail marketing vs. direct mail marketing? These skills you need in both areas!
Analysing the interests and behaviour of potentials and reaching them with relevant offers at the optimal time – that sounds suspiciously like email marketing, doesn’t it? Correct. But did you know that direct mail marketing also relies heavily on functions such as automation, personalisation and tracking?
In fact, the two marketing channels are more similar than you might think! Programmatic print also follows a data-driven cross-channel approach and requires many skills that are important in email marketing. So you can get into direct mail marketing relatively easily! In this blog post, we will tell you four relevant skills that you can also use to score points in direct mail automation.
1. Marketing skill: personalisation
Establishing a personal bond with customers should be close to every marketer’s heart. After all, a targeted approach not only increases conversion rates, but also customer loyalty and ROI. Both in email marketing and in direct mail marketing, there are numerous personalisation and segmentation options to use the channels as individual and targeted as possible.
You can address a person by name in a newsletter as well as on a postcard and give your advertising message a personal touch. It’s a similar story with customised images. This can be integrated both in an email and 1:1 on a direct mail such as a letter or a maxi postcard. This makes product recommendations by e-mail and mail, for example, even more individual and thus more relevant for your customers.
2. Marketing skill: automation
Are manual direct mail campaigns time-consuming and difficult to automate? This is not the case at all with programmatic print! In fact, you can automate direct mail campaigns like email campaigns in your marketing cloud and integrate them into the customer journey. This can save you up to 70-80% manual effort.
How does this work? Here we work with triggers, buyer personas and a predefined logic too. For example, you can determine whether direct mail such as postcards or self-mailers should be sent at a certain time (e.g. x days before a birthday or x weeks after the first purchase) or only when other requirements such as “customer x has always been very active, but has not purchased since time x” are met.
Small tip: Many email providers such as Emarsys or Klaviyo also function as a marketing cloud and thus enable seamless integration of direct mail. This means that you can always work on a uniform customer journey in the same tool.
3. Marketing skill: tracking
In email marketing, tracking works via web crawlers, cookies or call-to-action buttons. In the past, direct mail was actually not measurable because of elaborately produced, impersonal mass mailings were the status quo. An exclusion criterion that (unfortunately) still holds true today. With programmatic print everything is different and you can keep an eye on the performance of your direct mail.
For example, you can track who is interested in your offer and when he or she takes advantage of it. This is made possible by personalised voucher or QR codes on the postcard or letter. They invite your customers to take an action – the call-to-action. In most cases, this leads them to the app or the online shop, where you can track their visit and/or purchase. Ingenious, isn’t it?
4. Marketing skill: performance analysis
Performance is measured by performance – this is just as relevant for direct mail as it is for email campaigns. Only if you analyse the performance of your content can you optimise it and really reach your customers. This applies to the click-through rate (CTR) of your emails as well as to the conversion rates of direct mail. Voucher redemptions or shopping basket analysis can also be made with Direct Mail Automation.
But it gets even better: as with email marketing, you can use A/B testing to test your formats, incentives and images in programmatic print – and improve your results by up to 70%!
You can see, …
… direct mail marketing is not that much different!
As we have now discovered, email marketing and programmatic print overlap in many areas. The days when marketers had to undergo extra training or lengthy research to succeed in direct mail are long gone . Today, you use very similar skills with direct mail automation as you do with other digital marketing channels. And if you have specific questions about technical connections, data pushes or the development of use cases, our customer success management and solution engineering are always available to help.
