Your direct mail should not only look nice but also generate good performance. You need a call-to-action, but design and discounts aside, what else can you do to increase your direct mail performance?

We recommend 6 measures that guarantee good direct mail performance:

• Automation
• Segmentation
• Customer journey integration
• Omni-channel integration
• Hyper-personalization
• Testing

Automation

Automate your processes by creating a fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM) setup. Using a marketing cloud? Then you can easily integrate direct mail into your digital customer journey. 

The integration allows you to select automated mailing times and access real-time customer data, enabling segmentation, personal targeting, and personalization. 

The integration of direct mail into your marketing cloud is not only the basis for a good customer experience but also saves resources in campaign management.

Segmentation

Define buyer personas and tailor your offer accordingly.

You can define relevant criteria for segmentation based on the customer information you already have. Of course, your direct mail can be gender-specific or location-specific. But you can even tailor content and offers to a persona’s click and purchase behavior.

Our customer data shows that you can increase the performance of your print mailings by up to 15 percent through segmentation.

An example from Deichmann: the design and products offered vary based on age or marital status.

Customer Journey Integration

The main goal of your campaign should be to ensure that the right content reaches the right customer at the right time.

The direct mail should be adapted to the individual customer life cycle. This will make the message appear more exclusive and personal.

Here you will find examples of campaigns that are tailored to the customer journey:

For example, set up trigger points to automatically send a direct mail for reactivation after the first order or after 6 months of inactivity.

Make sure to communicate throughout the customer journey. Messages should build on each other to create continuity in your customer communication.

According to our customer data, customer journey mailings generate 15 to 30 percent higher conversion rates than classic mass mail. In addition, we can see a significant increase in customer loyalty.

Omni-Channel Integration

You don’t have to choose between direct mail and online marketing. Figure out where direct mail is most effective in the customer journey and use channels like paid ads or social media elsewhere.

Leverage the synergy of multiple channels by applying direct mail where email fails. In our experience, this can boost performance by up to 5%.

Example: You run a summer sale campaign via email and have an open rate of 30 percent. You can send a direct mail to the remaining 70 percent of your customers and still inform them about the summer sales.

“The most successful companies will be those that succeed in delivering connected customer experience across all channels and along the customer lifecycle.”

– Robert Rebholz, Managing Director at optilyz

Hyper-Personalization

Take advantage of information from your marketing cloud about your customers’ purchases, product views, items in the cart, ratings, likes, etc.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and recommendation engines, you can include sales-boosting recommendations in the physical mail. The more accurately the recommendations are tailored to the customer, the better the performance of your campaign.

In addition, you can positively influence the return on investment (ROI). If you include only a few targeted offers, you can use a smaller format such as a postcard instead of a catalog, reducing costs while increasing performance and revenue.

“Content is king”, that’s why you can achieve up to 40 percent performance increase with hyper-personalized content.

An example from baby-walz: in the campaign, individual offers were created for each customer based on their search history and recent purchases.

With the help of product recommendation algorithms, both the product offers and discounts are tailored to the individual customer and are highly relevant.

Testing

To increase your performance, you need to test what your customers respond best to.

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine what to test. If the response rate is low, the direct mail incl. the call-to-action should be revised and tested. But if the conversion rate is low relative to the response rate, optimize your landing page and test the effect.

In general, regular testing can increase performance by up to 10 percent.

An example from Deichmann: a reactivation campaign compared the conversion rate from a % reduction versus a fixed sum in €. You can create a multivariate test by adding another variable, such as the colors, the call-to-action, the mood image, or the landing page.

We recommend running tests on seasonal print campaigns because of the shipping volume. The more mailings you send, the more representative the result will be.

However, the requirement for increasing performance is and remains the automated recording of KPIs, which makes it possible to measure success. Find out how to measure the performance of your direct mail here!

August 3, 2021