Is Direct Mail the golden egg?

Direct Mail, also known as Advertising Mail or Ad Mail is an advertising material that is delivered to recipients through postal mail.

Direct Mail has been around for a long time, the first format has been found in around 1000 B.C in Thebes, Central Greece.

Since then Direct Mail has evolved and is more widely used by marketers around the world. Advertising Mail will represent in 2020 about 12% of the total ad spent in the US alone. Statistics are showing that the volume of Ad Mail sent is growing year over year.

Moreover, the report states that the volume of Direct Mail is set to keep increasing for two main reasons.

One, shipping costs are going down as new players are joining the space, such as Amazon. Secondly, printing costs are also going down as printers are getting more efficient and reliable.

As it became more popular, the requirements to produce effective campaigns have increased. Few new factors are now a must to use when designing an Ad Mail campaign, as discussed in our latest blog, here.

Direct Mail Key Elements

These key elements that now need to be part of Advertising Mail Campaigns are the following:

1. Proactive targeting of customers: Direct Mail needs to be part of an OmniChannel Marketing Strategy and not only used as a stand-alone marketing strategy, i.e. coordinated strategy of cross channel marketing.
2. 1:1 personalization: The content needs to be custom and unique to each recipient.
3. A well-written visual piece utilizing the latest printing techniques: The visual needs to stand out, quality is key.
4. A strong creative offer that conveys a call-to-action: No one says no to bargain even more now that customers get online to compare offers and prices.

Is it the Golden Egg?

Yes. As much as it is considered dead by others, it still stands as one of the effective ways to reach prospects and could possibly generate new leads for your business. Giving a competitive response rate of 5.1% than its online version leaving it with 0.6%. This low-cost marketing strategy can give a massive return when done right.

At Violette Marketing, we are advocates of using Ad Mail for our clients. We highlighted the main advantages in this blog post.

We use Direct Mail campaigns to generate new leads from neighboring communities around our clients’ locations as well as to increase the lifetime value of existing customers of our clients.

We, at Violette Marketing, use advanced in-house Advertising Mail techniques that we developed and fine-tuned over the years. We work closely with our clients to create the right target audience and the content associated with it including format, design, message, call-to-action, and tracking.

For instance, for one of our clients, we generated a 38% ROI with a Direct Mail campaign, here.