​Increase Online Engagement with Direct Mail Marketing

In today’s technology-driven world, brands continue to increase their use of online marketing techniques. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a discussion of modern marketing practices that does not favor digital marketing tactics. However, direct mail remains an extremely effective form of marketing that drives measurable ROI, and thus a powerful tool for the modern marketer. Beyond its intrinsic benefits, direct mail used in conjunction with online marketing can make both methods more powerful.

Social media is one online marketing opportunity that can easily be paired with direct mail to show bigger returns for your company.

So, how do you integrate direct mail with social media?

Put Your Social Media Icons on Your Direct Mail Postcard

If you've invested the time in creating and managing social media profiles for your company, you need to make sure that people know about them. Sure, some customers might find your social media pages through links that you've added to your website or through their own searches, but direct mail offers another opportunity for you to make both customers and prospects aware of your social media presence. Simply seeing the Facebook or Twitter logo on your postcard may help your target audience become aware that the company is sharing information on those channels too.

Encourage More Video Views by Making Your Direct Mail Interactive

Companies of all sizes and varieties are creating videos with their smart phones and uploading them to YouTube and other social media sites. Those videos can certainly help spread a company's message.

Did you know that online videos can be repurposed to make a direct mail piece interactive, while also encouraging more views of your video? Simply create a QR code that points directly to the YouTube video or to a mobile-optimized site that provides a link to the video. Place the QR code on your direct mail piece with a call-to-action and then watch how your growing audience responds.

Leverage Targeted Campaign Landing Pages within Social Media

You’ve created a thoughtful direct mail campaign including a landing page filled with compelling information and a lead acquisition form that contains the perfect number of questions. Should your landing page contents - and your ability to acquire or further qualify leads - be reserved only for direct mail recipients?

Try this - in addition to developing a landing page specific to your direct mail campaign, create a version that will be available to the general public. Post links to the general version of the landing page on your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites that your audience uses.

Throughout the campaign, measure how people are getting to your page. Is it through the direct mail? Or through Twitter or Facebook? These types of reports may help you to better invest your resources in future campaigns when it comes to segments of your audience, in addition to driving more traffic to your campaign pages.

Enable Landing Page Visitors to Easily Share Your Content

When someone visits your landing page, make it easy for them to share a link to your content on their own social media sites. Sharing can be enabled through a simple "Tweet This" button for Twitter, a "Like" button for Facebook, or some other type of social media plugin.

If your content is truly helpful and you make it easy for people to share it, your audience will grow with the help of others.

Drive People to Your Social Media Sites from the Thank You Page

Let's say that someone responds to the call-to-action on your postcard, types in their personalized URL, and fills out your response form - what do you do then? Do you simply say, "Thank You?" Well, you could do that and follow up with them later; or, you could try to further the engagement at that moment.

Try integrating your social media profiles into your Thank You page. This could mean adding icons that link to your social media pages or embedding a YouTube video onto the page. If a person has already shown interest in your company by completing a lead response form, they’re more likely to take a few minutes and learn a bit more about who you are and what you can do for them, so don’t miss the opportunity.