Mailings are the secret weapon for many profitable use cases
Unlike email marketing, letters, postcards, self-mailers and the like are not subject to the opt-in requirement. This means that they can be used to address almost the entire customer base. But postal mailings also offer an efficient supplement for customers who do not respond to online channels. Moreover, the advantage of the haptic message of a postcard is usually underestimated. Where an email quickly gets lost in the crowded inbox due to the high competition, the postcard on the home pinboard even lasts for weeks and converts at a much later date. But it is not enough to send generalized mass mailings to all customers. Regardless of whether a campaign is designed to acquire new customers, strengthen customer loyalty or boost sales through concrete incentives – the more relevant the content, the higher the conversion rates. If you are segmented in your postal mailings, you can use them profitably for the following areas of application.
Welcome mailings (“onboarding”)
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression” – The first impression is decisive for the further customer relationship. Therefore, new customers should be given the feeling that they have made the right choice with their purchase decision. However, an email quickly gets lost in a full inbox and has a very transactional effect. A personalised welcome letter expresses exclusivity and creates trust. New customers quickly become fans.
Example
As the operator of a flower delivery service, you decide to send new customers a welcome letter with a personal salutation after their first order. Besides the message “Welcome Mrs. Schmidt! Nice to have you with us” you add a discount of 10% for the next order.
Sales interaction
Customers go through many phases along the customer journey. These include, for example, advisory meetings. If you want to send further suggestions after an exchange with interested parties, letters offer a well suited print contact point for this application.
Example
The sales team of a wine merchant makes regular telephone calls to interested parties and customers. If, after a conversation, you have the feeling that there is a particularly high potential for a purchase, you decide to mark this potential customer so that a letter with further suggestions for various relevant wines can be sent to them.
Problem solution (“We are sorry.”)
Everybody makes mistakes. What is important is how a company deals with them. Since your reputation is at stake here, the apology should have a personal touch. If you decide on an “I’m sorry” postcard, the visual language of the design should reflect this message and it should include, for example, a “signature” of the head of the customer service department. Very important: A small compensation rounds off the message and generates additional sales. In this way, a mistake can quickly be converted into a customer loyalty campaign. An email is not very suitable here, as there is no risk that this message will appear “too general”.
Example
During the last order you accidentally delivered the wrong product to your top customers. As the loyalty of these customers is particularly important to you, send a personalised apology by letter with the message “We are sorry” and add an exclusive discount of €10 on the next order as compensation.
Individual mailings
If you send a birthday card at the right time, you show your customers that they are important. Thus, birthdays offer a special opportunity to strengthen the loyalty of the good customer in the long term. In addition, personalized incentives can be packaged as gifts and thus increase sales.
Example
From your customer data you can see when your customers have their birthday. You have also segmented your customer base according to customer value. So you decide to send your top customers a personalized greeting card on their birthday. You formulate an additional incentive to buy as an exclusive gift.
Branding
If you want to establish your brand in the consciousness of your customers, you should get in touch with them regularly. The best way to achieve this is through successful multi-channel marketing. Because the more points of contact the customer has with the brand, the greater the brand awareness. This leads to the fact that the customer first thinks of his own brand when making purchasing decisions. This is by no means trivial and requires consistent image cultivation. Personalized mailings offer a profitable addition to existing online channels.
Example
You own one of the leading brands of sportswear. You already advertise extensively on TV and online channels for the upcoming major football event. To present yourself to your top customers as the market leader, send them personalized postcards. The design of your postcard makes a clear reference to this topic.
Customer loyalty campaigns
The care of the most valuable customers is a particularly important task. Those who use relevant incentives to signal to their high value customers that they are important ensure regular sales and increase their average shopping cart value. For personalized mailings, this segment therefore represents a particularly worthwhile field of application.
Example
To further strengthen the bond with your most loyal customers, you decide to send them personalized self-mailers with exclusive incentives at regular intervals. The content is segmented according to gender. Women receive suggestions for women’s fashion and men receive suggestions for men’s fashion.
Recommendation marketing
If you want to thank your fans for their loyalty, send a personalized letter and link it with a recommendation message. Because the chances for a recommendation are particularly good here. In this way, you thank your top customers with relevant incentives and at the same time acquire new customers. In this way, postal mailings are not just a tool for customer interaction, but also help to acquire new customers.
Example
As a thank you, send your fans a personalised letter with a voucher code. Since the chances of a recommendation are particularly high with this group, add the message “Recommend us” and two additional voucher codes for friends and acquaintances. This works extremely well for product categories with special target groups (e.g. parents, athletes, pet owners).
Cross- & up-selling
Cross- & up-selling campaigns are also an interesting field of application for mailings, as there is great potential for increasing customer value. If you know your customers’ interests, you can use addressed advertising mail to create targeted incentives for related products or to raise awareness of your own brand.
Example
The history of some customers shows that they are mainly interested in one product category from your range. Since you are about to establish a brand for this segment yourself, you decide to send these customers a personalised postcard with a 30% discount on their next purchase of your own brand. In doing so, you benefit from your significantly increased margin on the private label.
Event marketing
Personalized mailings offer a profitable field of application for those who want to increase sales of regional sales events. Because emails for events usually do not reach enough recipients. An event postcard, on the other hand, can bridge even longer periods of time on the kitchen table at home. So if you send customers postal incentives to an event, you can most likely enjoy “a full parking lot”.
Example
Your fashion stores in Hamburg will start their summer sales in one month. In order to boost sales properly, you will send a personalized self-mailer to all customers in the 21035 – 22397 postal code area in advance. Men will receive extracts from the greatly reduced men’s collection and women from the women’s collection.
Customer reactivation
The topic of customer reactivation is a particularly exciting field of application for postal mailings. Often customers do not respond to online channels or cannot be reactivated by email due to the lack of opt-in. Anyone who adds a postal touchpoint to their customer journey in the final step of a reactivation campaign, for example, has a good chance of reactivating customers after all. The conversion rates for this application are usually between 1% and 8%, which makes it highly profitable in many areas.
Example
You are planning a cross-channel campaign to reactivate your customers. After four weeks of inactivity, you send a personalized email including a voucher code of 10%. After another two weeks of inactivity, you send another personalized email with a 15% discount on the next order. After another four weeks of no response, send your high value customers a personalized postcard with the message “We miss you” and add an exclusive 20% discount.
Contact activation
If customers have already been using free basic products of a freemium model for a long time, personalised mailings are also suitable for raising the status of these customers to a chargeable level. After all, those who supplement their online communication with postal contact points can reach customers better with relevant incentives for their own premium products. In this way, basic customers quickly become high-revenue premium customers.
Example
You want to encourage customers who have been using your software platform in the basic license to switch to the premium license. So you decide to send these customers a personalized letter with the following message: “Get started now and take advantage of our premium benefits! With your exclusive coupon code AXM492 the first three months are even free of charge”.
Shopping cart breaker recovery
In e-commerce, shopping cart dropouts are a well-known phenomenon. A customer is about to make a purchase decision, but cancels the process with a full shopping cart. Anyone who documents which items are in the shopping cart at the time of cancellation should use this information for their mailings. In this way, you can persuade one or two almost lost customers to buy after all.
Example
You recognize that certain customers leave your site before they make a purchase. So you decide to send a personalized postcard to all customers who had a certain shopping cart value after the purchase is cancelled, with the following message: “The right products must be well chosen. Maybe this exclusive 20% discount will help you make your decision.”
New customer acquisition
For many companies, the acquisition of new customers is one of the most important tasks in marketing, along with the care of existing customers. Through partnerships with other companies or the purchase of addresses, important information about potential customers can be acquired in advance. If you use this information in a targeted manner, you can significantly increase the success of your new customer acquisition through mailings with relevant content.
Example
As an insurance company, you decide to purchase addresses of a certain age group (and according to other criteria) from upscale residential areas in order to acquire new customers. Since the sale of financial products requires a high degree of trust, you send a personalised letter to all residents. This will convey the complex contents and give the recipients sufficient time to decide on the conclusion of the contract at a later date.
With optilyz you can implement your mailings profitably for all fields of application
On the optilyz platform you can book new mailing campaigns in a few minutes. Furthermore, recurring mailings can be efficiently automated and existing campaigns can be easily optimised. In addition, optilyz enables you to transfer modern marketing approaches to postal mailings. Letters, postcards, self-mailers and the like can be better segmented. This increases the postal advertising success for many fields of application by 30%-70%. Of course, not every field of application should be used in every industry and segment. Please contact us for further information.