The Unsung Hero of Remarketing Efforts
We hear it time and time again in marketing, we’ve moved into the digital age. Search, social, and display advertising reign supreme and traditional marketing methods seem old-fashioned. So how do you keep direct mail at the forefront of your clients’ minds? It’s true that the internet has completely transformed how marketers communicate with consumers, but mail has an advantage – touch. A direct mail piece gives your client the opportunity to create a tactile, tangible connection with consumers which has been shown to lead to stronger brand recall. In a world where the average consumer sees between 4,000 and 10,000 marketing messages a day, this is a key differentiating factor that helps direct mail stand above other advertising channels. But that still begs the question, what is direct mail’s place in today’s digital landscape?
Direct mail retargeting brings the digital and physical worlds together. When prospects respond to your direct mail or digital marketing, technology matches the IP address, device ID, and cookies on the device of website visitors to a mailing address so that they can be retargeted with a hyper-personalized mailer tailored to the actions that they took on the website. Some may be wondering though, “Why does this matter? If someone is already coming to my website aren’t they already aware of my product or service? Why do I need to keep marketing to them?”
While it’s true that having someone visit your website is a critical point in the purchase journey, only 4% of visitors to a business website take any sort of action, meaning 96% of your client’s website visitors come and go without doing anything! Imagine having a store where 96 out of 100 people enter and then leave without making a purchase, you’d do something to bring them back in, right?
Our first response as marketers was to continue to engage those website visitors digitally with retargeted display advertising, and while this is a great way to maintain brand awareness, the average click through rate of digital retargeting ads hovers anywhere between .25% and .70%. Additionally, most prospective buyers will visit competitors’ websites and are retargeted with their ads also. Between email fatigue, ad blindness, ad blocking, and increased competition, digital retargeting needs to be supplemented. You need to do something MORE – something to stand out in the sea of digital ads careening through the web and social newsfeeds.
Historically we’ve relied on direct mail to cut through the marketing clutter as a standalone communications vehicle, but with direct mail retargeting, we can now take a consumer’s online behavior and tailor their direct mail experience based on the actions they took. This enables marketers to refine messaging, provide more relevant content, create a seamless brand experience, and provide a stand out offer driving them to convert to you instead of your competitors.
Specific website actions that can serve as a trigger for a direct mail retargeting campaign include:
- Website visits from a past customer
- Email or newsletter signups
- Downloads of marketing collateral (brochures, infographics, white papers, )
- Product or location page views
- Leaving the website with items in their shopping cart
Not only do these actions serve as strong indicators of purchase intent, a retargeted direct mail piece fits in organically after these actions to push consumers closer to completing their purchase or a desired action. The key to success here lies in using this data to create a customized piece to send to consumers.
By using the power of variable printing, you can send a customized direct mail piece based on website behaviors, creating a serendipitous moment with a consumer, speaking directly to them and providing information that we know they need, not what we think they need. For example, instead of vague or generalized messaging, you can create a direct mail piece based on the pages they viewed or items they put in their shopping cart. Giving you the information needed to send them a customized direct mail piece designed to drive them back to the website to complete their purchase with a coupon code.
This use case highlights the lowest hanging retargeting fruit – tackling abandoned shopping carts. Short of making a purchase, putting an item in a shopping cart serves as one of the strongest signals for purchase intent.
Unfortunately, there are a multitude of factors that cause someone to abandon a shopping cart even though they have every intent to purchase that item. They were interested. By sending a targeted direct mail piece with customized messaging based on what they had in their shopping cart, you can create that connection with the consumer to drive them back to the website and complete their purchase.
Similar to the abandoned shopping cart, direct mail retargeting can reengage website visitors by using imagery of the products or content that they browsed. You can even take it a step further and incorporate complimentary content or items to serve as an opportunity for an upsell.
Direct mail retargeting is also an efficient way to reengage lapsed subscribers. 82% of direct mail is read for a minute or more, meaning that through a direct mail retargeting campaign, you can help your clients grab the attention of their past customers and deliver a physical piece of communication tailored to their purchase history or website activity.
So how do you integrate direct mail retargeting into your existing print business?
To find out more email or call us! [email protected] 800-956-4129
