Learn the differences between junk mail and direct mail to ensure your message is delivered, read, and remembered.
1. It’s Not Junk if It’s Targeted.
Print advertising remains one of the most targetable mediums. Targeting with superior data allows you to create mailing universes that are efficient, effective, and, as we’ll see in Tip #2, highly personal in terms of talking to a unique audience about what matters or motivates them the most.
For example, dividing a political direct mail plan into multiple subsets of voters based on issue identification (pro-2nd Amendment, pro-life, fiscal conservative) or crafting audiences for brand marketing based on a combination of geographic, demographic, and psychographic data can produce finely-tune direct mail that not only saves on postage, but ensures you are talking to the right audience with the right message.
Learn more about how to save on postage.
2. It’s Not Junk if It’s Personal.
While personalization can come in the form of the addressing of your mail, and ensuring that the individual or the family is addressed by name, data and targeting allows you to tailor messaging for specific audiences. That ensures that Sally Voter, who is most interested in tax issues, hears from your political campaign about your plan to restore fiscal responsibility. It means Joe Buyer, who lives within a certain geographic range of your restaurant and has a particular median income and children, receives your coupons for “kids eat free” night. It means Jane Constituent, who lives in your district and cares about jobs, is motivated by your organization’s call to contact her elected representatives about an important vote on trade.
“For a recent project for a brand client – with the goal of gaining new customers utilizing direct mail marketing – we started by taking a step back and doing a deep-dive geographic analysis of where our client’s location was in relation to their competition. We then over-laid census and consumer data, including population estimates and median household range, to identify the most target rich areas for growing our client’s customer base. By doing this, we identified key zip codes for targeting but also identified consumers who lived within a given distance of a location. Rather than stopping there, we went another step further by utilizing consumer data and predictive modeling to determine the consumers within this geography who would be most interested in the services of our brand client – in this specific instance, that was female consumers who were modeled ‘Yoga Enthusiasts’ or likely to have an interest in aerobic exercise, sporty living, yoga, physical fitness or pilates.”
– Ashley Burns, Director of Data Analytics and Audience Insights
3. It’s Not Junk if It’s Trusted.
The sheer physical nature of direct mail lends itself to being one of the most trusted mediums, but without a compelling message and meaningful call to action to back it up, that trust can quickly go by the wayside. Print advertising creates a bridge between you and your targeted audience, supported by your message and call to action.
Download our “Why Mail” e-booklet today to learn more about the power of direct mail.