Yep, You Can Use Direct Mail in Your Marketing Drip Campaign

Have you ever taken a look at your marketing strategy, stepped back, and realized that you’re providing the same experience to all of your prospects, regardless of their stage in the sales cycle or their experience with your company? Maybe those who have just expressed interest in your business or organization are getting the same marketing information as those who have known and interacted with your company for years. Or maybe the three audience types you target are receiving largely the same content, even though some audiences have expressed more interest in some topics than others. Drip campaigns are designed to address these challenges.

What Is a Drip Campaign?

A drip campaign is an automated, multi-touch lead nurture marketing campaign meant to move prospects over a period of time through the marketing funnel all the way to an eventual conversion. Triggered by an interaction such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product, drip campaigns are distributed on a schedule and allow you to personalize your marketing strategy by providing your audience with the content that’s most relevant to them.

Why Should You Use a Direct Mail Drip Campaign?

Typically, drip campaigns are associated with email marketing, but they work well with direct mail, too, as a means of engaging with your audience and increasing brand familiarity. The great news is that you can automate direct mail drip campaigns in the same way you’d automate email drip campaigns.

And if you’re looking for high response rates, (you should be) direct mail is the way to go. The just-released 2018 Response Rate Report from The Data and Marketing Association showed that direct mail has a massive 9% response rate for household lists and a 4.9% response rate for prospect lists, higher than all of the digital channels studied. In comparison, email, social media, and paid search averaged 1%, while online display averaged only .03%. Ummm, direct mail, we see you!

How to Do It

As mentioned above, an important component of any drip campaign is to continually provide content that will be useful to your audience based on their individual experience with your business or organization. That said, it’s more than just a monthly check-in or appeal. You need to personalize the campaign based on your audience’s conversion journey. And this is easy to do when you combine digital marketing that’s easily trackable with a personalized direct mail campaign.

A Few Examples

If a prospect is in the early stages of the buying cycle for a particular product (maybe they’ve clicked on one of your Facebook ads but not completed a purchase), you can send direct mail postcards with a coupon or discount code for that particular product to push them to buy. If they buy, send them a brochure or other mail piece months later that details all of the different ways they can use the product they purchased -- and continue the drip campaign with more relevant content from there.

Another example is to follow up with customers with more info on the topics they’ve indicated interest based on their previous interactions with your business or organization. Say you work for a small marketing agency that is skilled in multiple areas – graphic design and video marketing, for example. Not all of your prospects are going to need both of those services. How can you customize the prospect journey so that each one is receiving the experience they need in order to convert?

Add two white papers to your site, complete with contact forms -- one white paper for each service area. Track who downloads which white paper. Based on those downloads, send a mailer with a short booklet detailing your services in the particular area that they’ve shown interest in. These are just a few examples, but you get the idea.

If you’re ready to start incorporating direct mail into your drip campaigns but need high-quality print materials to get going, QuantumPostcards has you covered. We offer printing services for direct mail postcards, brochures, flyers, custom invites, greeting cards and more, with an easy upload process and free next business-day turnaround so you get the materials quickly.

Don’t hesitate – activating drip campaigns to customize the customer journey and increase the likelihood that prospects will convert is a smart strategy for any marketer.