Consumers More Web Active When They Receive Direct Mail First

For years, marketers have viewed direct mail and online marketing as very separate ecosystems. While direct mail and online marketing may seem worlds apart, they’re actually very similar, as well as extremely interconnected.

The marketing actions your business engages in offline have a huge effect on how its customers interact with it online. This means that your direct mail pieces could have an immense impact on how your business’s customers use its website.

Consumers are far more web active when they receive direct mail first than they are without any offline marketing. Consumers that have received direct mail postcards record 16% more site visits, 22% more pageviews and 15% more time on site.

There’s also much more to support the case for direct mail as a powerful tool for any business’s marketing efforts:

According to a USPS study, 98% of consumers bring their mail inside the same day it’s delivered. 77% sort through their mail immediately, reading direct mail pieces and personal letters almost as soon as they’ve arrived.

With the average office worker receiving 121 emails per day, many of which are left unread for days after they arrive, that’s a significant advantage in response time for direct mail. However, it’s not the only advantage direct mail has over the web.

Recipients spend, on average, 30 minutes reading their mail. An impressive 67% of mail recipients feel that their mail communications are more personal than Internet communications, making it a higher priority for their attention.

Most interestingly, particularly for online marketers, is that 44% of customers will visit a brand’s website after receiving a direct mail piece. That’s not an insignificant amount – over the course of a large campaign, it’s hundred of thousands of people.

It’s also significantly higher than the number of people that click through to visit a brand’s website after receiving a promotional email. Just 22.87% of recipients even bother to open an email, let alone click through to the sender’s website.

With the price of attention on online advertising platforms like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads increasing every year, often to the point that small businesses can’t compete with larger rivals, direct mail has become a cost-effective alternative.

There’s also a synergistic benefit to using direct mail as a way to draw attention to your business’s website. Online shoppers who interact with a brand through more than one marketing channel spend 30% more time on site than the average.

If you knew that you could get four in 10 people to visit your website with a simple direct mail postcard campaign, would you do it? That’s more than 10 percent more people than would visit your website after receiving a promotional email.

At first glance, direct mail and online marketing are worlds apart. One is offline and traditional – the other is purely digital. Look a little closer, however, and it’s obvious that direct mail doesn’t generate a purely offline response.

If you’ve been searching for an affordable, highly effective alternative to email and other online marketing channels that can deliver motivated, interested traffic right to your business’s website, direct mail could be the perfect choice.