This guide outlines the advantages programmatic direct mail offers vs traditional email marketing, and how it can benefit your business.
In today’s digital age, marketing has become more sophisticated, data-driven, and personalised than ever before. Among the latest trends in marketing is automated direct mail, which combines the power of data-driven insights with the physicality and personal touch of direct mail. It allows businesses to create highly personalised and engaging direct mail campaigns that resonate with their target audience, driving customer engagement, loyalty, and ultimately, sales.
How programmatic direct mail improves personalization
In this guide, we’ll look at how programmatic direct mail takes personalisation to the next level.
Programmatic vs. traditional direct mail marketing
Traditional direct mail has been a tried-and-tested method for many decades. However, it has its drawbacks, since this traditional form of marketing can be costly, resource intensive, time-consuming, and often results in low response rates. In recent years, direct mail marketing has been transformed by programmatic direct mail (PDM), which uses data-driven insights to create personalised messages.
Rather than sending a generic mailer to a broad audience, PDM allows businesses to tailor messages to specific audiences based on their interests, behaviour, and purchase history. This targeted approach can often result in higher response rates and a better return on investment (ROI).
The use of technology in PDM also sets it apart from traditional direct mail. With PDM, businesses and brands can use sophisticated tools to automate the most labour-intensive processes in direct mail campaigns, including creating personalised designs, printing and mailing.
Personalisation in programmatic direct mail marketing
Personalisation in automated direct mail campaigns includes more than just adding a customer’s name to a mailer. It can involve tailoring a direct mail piece’s messaging, design, and content to a target audience based on their interests, behaviour, and even purchase history. Personalisation helps to build brand loyalty and customer satisfaction by staying in touch with your audience and making them feel valued and understood. For instance, a clothing brand could use data on past purchases to send customers a direct mail piece featuring products they are likely to be interested in.
Why personalisation is more effective with automated direct mail
Adding a personal touch to your marketing materials is an effective way to boost customer engagement and conversions. However, programmatic direct mail takes personalisation to the next level by allowing direct mail marketers to tailor everything from mail piece design, messaging and scheduling to testing and real-time monitoring of direct mail campaigns. This approach is far more effective than traditional direct mail because it allows businesses to increase the relevance and impact of their marketing efforts by creating highly segmented and targeted campaigns that are more likely to resonate with their audience.
Automated direct mail campaigns can also be executed at scale, allowing businesses to reach a large audience while maintaining personalisation and relevancy. This can result in increased ROI and customer engagement.
For example, Thames Water launched a direct mail awareness campaign to 260,000 households in the highest-risk areas to inform them of the dangers of sewer blockages and encourage them to dispose of wet wipes and cooking oil responsibly. This resulted in a 26% reduction in sewer blockages in targeted areas, and around 70% of recipients reported changing their behaviour when it came to disposing of household waste, such as cooking grease and wet wipes.
Overall, the use of personalisation in programmatic direct mail marketing makes the messaging more relevant, engaging, and memorable for your audience. It creates a positive brand experience for customers, which can often lead to higher response rates, conversions, and ROI.
To sum up
In conclusion, programmatic direct mail marketing has many benefits over traditional direct mail. It even takes direct mail to the next level by leveraging data and technology to provide customers with personalised messaging and experiences.
Personalisation is often the key to success in any type of marketing campaign, whether you are promoting a new product or service, encouraging a change in behaviour, or keeping your audience engaged and informed about your business. It helps in developing positive and strong relationships between brands and customers, which can lead to increased response rates, engagement, conversions, and, ultimately, sales. Businesses that use this type of direct mail marketing can give their customers a more tailored experience, giving them a competitive edge in the crowded market of today.
