Despite the rise of digital marketing, there’s still no substitute for a deftly executed marketing mail campaign. This is especially true when you consider that marketing mail typically generates a response rate as much as 15 times greater than email, and 65% of a marketing mail campaign’s audience will respond to an offer or make a purchase.
To get the most out of your marketing mail campaign, you need to expedite your mail delivery efforts to head off potential delays, integrate digital channels (particularly mobile) with your physical communications, and exercise greater control over the visibility into your campaign.
Increasing Speed with a Presort Partner
Timing is everything in comedy. It’s also everything in marketing mail. Multichannel marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts, especially when mobile ads are part of the mix. The delivery and receipt of the mail piece -- and how the activation of a mobile ad revolves around that delivery schedule -- must all be perfectly synchronized for the best chance of reaching a customer, getting a response, and influencing a purchase. Any delays or miscues can jam up the process. That’s why visibility is so important. But that’s also why speed is so important. Getting the speed and timing of your mail pieces just right has effects on everything from staffing and inventory costs to the mail service provider’s own reputation for timely deliveries.
But you shouldn’t have to choose between optimized pricing and timely deliveries. Finding a partner with the operational resources and mailing expertise needed to speed up your marketing mail campaigns is the best way to optimize both costs and delivery.
Mailers can align with a presort partner for commingling; consolidating mail from across different sources, sorting by ZIP Code and inducting into the USPS mail stream; or through a hybrid model where they still manage some presorting in-house, inducting the mail themselves, but relying on a partner for the additional scale and services they need. A presort partner can also offer a nationwide logistics network that inducts mail into the USPS mail stream closer to its destination, allowing you to send out presorted mail at different points of entry, helping to ensure the fastest possible delivery times.
That kind of partnership provides a more strategic edge to your marketing mail efforts, lowering postage costs for the campaign and ensuring that all of the assets you’ve built up around timely mail deliveries – like digital ad campaigns, product inventory, and staffing needs that have been allocated for certain times – aren’t going to waste, and are instead helping you recoup an even bigger ROI.
Mail + Mobile
The prevalence and impact of mobile advertising are impossible to deny. When 76% of shoppers are engaging with a mobile ad during a given six-month span, and 28% of transactions are being done over mobile, that’s not something that marketers can ignore. But rather than be seen as a threat to a marketing mail campaign, mobile can be used in tandem to achieve enormous benefits. In fact, leveraging a digital channel alongside your physical mailings can boost response rates by 118% and conversion rates by 28%!
End-to-End Visibility
That kind of multichannel strategy can only get you so far if you don’t have the visibility into your campaign to go with it. After all, what good is syncing up your digital and physical marketing if you can’t confirm that the actual mail pieces were actually received by customers, or even sent in the first place?
Having control over the entire end-to-end delivery process – from tracking when a mail piece has been sent out, to determining where it is en route to the recipient, to verifying it was in fact received – provides peace of mind that your campaign is working. It also helps in the event your response rates fall below expectations. Did a customer not respond to an offer because they didn’t find it very engaging? Or did they not receive it altogether? Were there other mail pieces sent to that ZIP Code that saw similarly low response rates? These are all questions you can answer, allowing you to draw conclusions about the efficacy of your campaign, but only if you have the data provided by end-to-end tracking.
This is doubly important for a multichannel campaign, such as when you have mobile ads for a customer that won’t trigger without confirmation that a customer received a direct mail piece first. Not having that kind of visibility can result in mistimed digital ads – or missed ads altogether – that impair how effective your strategy will be in the long run.
These three keys (increasing speed with a presort partner, combining mail with mobile, and ensuring end-to-end tracking and visibility) will help your marketing mail campaign achieve or exceed industry benchmarks for response and conversion. When executed this way, your marketing mail campaigns will continue to deliver exceptional ROI.
Bruce Gresham is Vice President, Product Management and Strategy, Pitney Bowes Presort Services. For more information, read “Amplify your Marketing Mail” or visit https://www.pitneybowes.com/us/presort-services/marketing-mail/marketing-mail.html to learn more.
