8 Features to Look for In Modern Direct Mail Solutions

Brands that invest heavily in direct mail solutions are reaping the benefits.

For all of the focus on digital platforms in modern marketing, direct mail is a surprisingly effective marketing channel that continues to be an unsung hero for companies in nearly every industry.

What’s driving that newly found effectiveness?

First, overall mail volumes are falling, while email and digital saturation are growing problems. Direct mailers are encountering less competition in the mailbox.

Second, technology is disrupting the old fashioned direct mail production workflows that haven’t evolved over the years. New direct mail management software is driving greater efficiency and new use cases for direct mail as a channel.

Automated direct mail software is a fast growing new category of direct mail solution that enables marketers to deploy direct mail with the speed and analytics that they’re accustomed to with their digital marketing efforts. 

To make the most of ANY marketing channel, you have to invest in a solution that allows you to capture and utilize data in your campaigns. 

Analytics and data play a key role in every marketing campaign we launch today. That shouldn’t change when launching direct mail campaigns. Today’s marketers need modern direct mail solutions to help them optimize campaigns and maximize their ROI.

CRM Integration

You can’t improve the way that you engage with your customers and prospects without tracking who they are. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is absolutely essential. The average return on investment for CRM usage is $8.71 for every dollar spent. Still, somehow 22% of salespeople still don’t know what a CRM is, showing that there is a lot of room for CRM usage growth in many companies.

Being able to track your interactions with customers and store their data in a singular place makes it easy to analyze your interactions throughout the sales process (and post-sales) and pinpoint areas for improvement. Connecting your direct mail campaigns directly to your CRM is vital for maximizing the return of each campaign that you send.  

Learn 3 Quick CRM/Direct Mail Wins

No Minimum Run Sizes

Traditionally, direct mail has been a large batch, or large list type of marketing effort. The economics of setting up a custom print run at a print/mail facility have always required marketers to send direct mail only to lists of over 1,000 or more.

Today, leading direct mail solutions treat every campaign the same, whether it involves 1 mailer, 100, 1,000 or 100,000 mailers. Direct mail pricing in the best solutions is flat, affordable and small campaigns are on equal footing with very large mail drops.

Personalized URL Tracking

Personalization should play a key role in every direct mail campaign that you send. In fact, 68% of marketers say personalization based on behavioral data has a high impact on ROI. A personalized tracking URL (pURL) serves multiple purposes. First, it gives you a way to track engagement with your campaign on an individual level. Since your recipients receive a unique URL, you can actively track when, and how often, they engage with your website.

Your ultimate goal is to speak to your customer’s biggest concerns. The personalized URL is in itself a conversion-boosting feature as well. A personalized URL with their name or company in the title catches eyes and helps increase interest in your campaign. People love to receive campaigns that are custom-tailored to them as individuals, and nothing shows that your offer for them more than a personalized URL.

Combine Direct Mail and Email

Did you know that direct mail campaigns enjoy an average response rate of 4.4%, compared to only 0.12% for email?  Combining the two can bolster response rates for both channels.

Get 6 Powerful Direct Mail Campaign Ideas That Work With Email

Any modern direct mail solutions worth their salt should also provide features for combining direct mail and email to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. There is no reason that a direct mail campaign should remain isolated from other marketing channels, particularly when those channels could play a key role in improving the effectiveness of your original campaign. Direct mail should be a part of any company’s multi-channel approach.

Download Direct Mail/Email Workflows

Scheduling follow-up emails based on the actions taken by your prospects can be a great way to grow your relationship with them and catch them at a time when they are engaged with your product. Our system allows you to be creative in the way that you combine the two channels, creating a smart high-touch experience for your prospects without the manual effort.

Triggered Direct Mail

Workflow automation is becoming the norm in modern marketing organizations. Triggered email campaigns that send a sequence of emails after a change in a CRM is recorded (filled out a form, changed lead score, etc) are now common place.

The best direct mail solutions make triggered direct mail as easy as setting up an email campaign. Savvy marketers are adding direct mail to existing email workflows and seeing huge improvements in metrics.

Behavioral Segmentation

Postalytics includes behavioral segmentation, which allows you to separate your recipients based on the actions that they take. Being able to track the delivery process for each piece that you send out provides you with the data that you need to develop personalized, automated workflows based on the behavior of the recipient. In email marketing, segmented email campaigns have open rates that are 14.32% higher than non-segmented campaigns.

Behavioral segmentation can include:

• Remarketing

• Persona-specific campaigns.

• Segmentation by lead scoring.

• Engagement with content.

Direct Mail Templates

One of the most expensive aspects of putting together a direct mail campaign is design. Paying a designer to put together a new design for every campaign that you send out as a direct impact on your ROI, especially since you don’t want to hire a low-level designer for important marketing campaigns. Solid design work is expensive and eats into your marketing budgets.

Modern direct mail solutions should provide a range of templates for you to use, covering all of the standard sizes and types of collateral. Postalytics offers a wide range of templates that you can use for your campaigns and also gives you the power to alter and personalize them as you see fit. Our drag-and-drop interface makes it incredibly easy to utilize our templates, even without experience in direct mail design.

Modern, Flexible API

Many marketing organizations are investing heavily in their marketing tech stacks. In fact, there are now more than 8,000 marketing technology software vendors selling to businesses.

In order to make these solutions work together, the best direct mail solutions offer easy to use and flexible REST based APIs.

What does a good direct mail API give you? Here’s a quick checklist:

• An easy way to trigger direct mail from a webhook
• An easy way to consume deliver and response data via webhook
• Tools that let you embed pre-built user interfaces for the most challenging parts of the direct mail workflow, such as:
  • Template management
  • List management
  • Campaign Dashboards

Great direct mail API’s make direct mail look, act and feel like every other modern, digital marketing channel.

Modern Direct Mail Solutions, Modern Results

A common misconception is that direct mail as a channel must be isolated from other marketing channels. Most companies that send direct mail campaigns are sending their materials off into the void without any substantial direct mail tracking system in place. Not only does that ensure that they aren’t maximizing the effectiveness of their campaign, they also aren’t capturing any data that will prove useful in future campaigns.

A modern system that ties your direct mail campaigns to other marketing channels provides a huge leg up. Most of your competition that is sending direct mail campaigns is unlikely to be making a similar investment, giving you a leg up. Further, it provides you with another reliable source of data that you can use to inform your marketing and sales processes.

Direct mail might be an “old school” strategy but with the help of modern direct mail solutions, you can enjoy popular features that have helped make digital marketing channels a solid investment for growing companies.

Want to see what a modern system looks like?

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