Should you ditch your direct mailing program in favor of marketing via email or social media? Not so fast, says the Wall Street Journal, which recently did a story about the decline of direct mail and the potential consequences for businesses.
According to the article, small business owners have been slashing direct mailing campaigns in an attempt to save money, only to find that their online campaigns aren’t producing the same amount of business.
For example,the article profiled Alicia Settle, president of Pro Annum Inc., who dropped a $20,000 direct mail loyalty campaign in favor of marketing through email only to find that the business’ orders dropped a whopping 25% from the previous year. Her company was able to recover the lost business by sending out the postcards to customers over the summer. The direct mail campaign, which had seemed like an indulgence, was actually an important investment.
Instead of dropping direct mail altogether, the Wall Street Journal notes that savvy marketers are working smarter, creating more personalized campaigns that catch recipients’ attention and generate higher response rates.
In the article, Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said that the ideal direct mail campaign for 2010 is “something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message.”
Targeted direct mail campaigns may still be indispensable for many businesses, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore social media, either. For 2010, many companies are trying to integrate the two. From the Wall Street Journal:
Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. “The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers,” Mr. Anderson says.
Dukky’s platform offers an easy and effective way to integrate traditional direct response with social media. Our platform lets you send personalized offers to recipients using personalized URLs, either by direct mail or email. These offers can then be shared via email and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
With just a few clicks, customers can share your discounts and promotions with family and friends, helping them spread like wildfire. Dukky lets you harness the power of personalization and social media, improving ROI so that you get more out of every dollar you spend.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Direct Mail Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great article! It is vital that small businesses don’t give up on their direct mail campaigns. With dwindling marketing budgets, it is critical to be as effective as possible for less money. Therefore a targeted, personalized direct mail campaign that uses a well designed postcard can have immediate impact.
Thanks, Amy!
Yes, that’s the key, I think…leveraging personalization and social media to be able to do more with less, rather than scrapping direct mail altogether.
Our philosophy at VLG is that direct mail is one of the best vehicles for taking a person sitting at a desk to the web. We only send dimensional or intrigue-based mail to get that visit rate or mail-to-web rate up. Our numbers vary between 20% and 40% on mail-to-web rates, so I’d suggest reducing list size and upping your per piece budget. It also doesn’t hurt to have a cool microsite at the other end of the mail piece. Dimensional mail to a corporate homepage is a let down. If you want to get our social media engagement up, you need to first get them to the web. Thanks for the post!!
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