With the emergence of digital media, most people thought that print media could soon be obsolete. As social media, online forums and online social groups took over the marketing arena, marketers almost forgot about direct mail, brochures, and catalogs. But recent direct mail statistics showcase that print marketing is gaining traction once more with more customers responding to direct mails than emails or social media ads. 

The tangible nature of print media gives it an edge over digital advertising. It is personalized and increases customer engagement as customers feel they are part of the business. Today, technology has revolutionized print media allowing companies to produce advertising materials with attractive designs and excellent graphics. Having realized the vitality of print marketing and its effectiveness in bolstering customer response rates, it is imperative to implement a practical marketing strategy. Here are some tips that can help increase lead conversion and retention through print marketing. 

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM Tools) 

Improving response rates implies targeting the right market. Your client base might span from young to old, or from rich to middle class but you’d love to provide personalized catalogs for every customer. CRM software can assist you to track the behavior of your customers in online platforms. It assists in highlighting the desires and products likely attractive to a particular customer. With CRM, you can create targeted print marketing that will be effective guaranteeing positive ROI. 

Research by Direct Marketing Association points out that 42% of direct mail customers prefer responding online meaning increased traffic and customer engagement in your site. You can increase this percentage by using CRM to ultra-personalize brochures, guides, and recommendations you send to your customers. Again, it has been found that adding the customer’s name, more personalized information and full color boosts the response rate by 500%. CRM helps to gather prospect’s information as they interact in various digital media. With this information at hand, you can create colored, well-designed catalogs or postcards or that resonates with the desires of the recipient. 

Diversify Your Print Marketing Techniques 

Do not rely only on print mail. Use other print designs to improve networking – a vital tool in creating meaningful connections that trigger word-of-mouth advertising through referrals. Use business cards so that whenever you meet prospects in soirees, pitching decks or tradeshows, you can hand to them so that they can contact your business later. Combine this by creatively designing your physical stores with conspicuous signs, banners or even flags. 

Such form of print advertising enables customers to associate products in your physical store with those offered in your e-commerce outlet. It makes them visit your site for more information and more products thus increasing traffic and ultimately the response rates. Moreover, when you’ve product promotions underway, why not use postcards? They are simple, easy to read and allow the customer to highlight the best products in a whim. Accompany your postcard with catalogs that showcase prices of items to enable the customer to choose what’s ideal. 

What if you want to increase customer awareness of product specs and benefits? The answer is designing eye-catching brochures. Ensure that your brochures talk less but say more. You can even spruce up your brochures by including links to videos. With these techniques, you can get to utilize the power of print media which is its ability to stick into the mind of the customer. 

Striking a Balance Between Print Marketing and Digital Marketing 

It is possible to concentrate on one form advertising until you realize you’ve shoved away the other completely. Effective marketing campaigns emanate by creating an equilibrium point between the two forms of advertising. Lay out a framework that enables you to track customers in the online and physical world. Such frameworks are paramount in identifying the effectiveness of every marketing channel. It allows you to analyze response rates in regard to every print or digital media marketing technique. Also, you can increase conversion rates by retargeting customers by linking direct mail and online ads. 

When launching a direct mail marketing campaign, ensure that the offers are compelling, attractive and apt for the target market. Here are some tips to help create direct mails that lead to higher response rates. 

• Use customer name and other personalized information 
• Provide enough information about the products 
• Ensure the benefits of the products are more than the features 
• Accompany direct mails with gifts 
• Utilize time limits to trigger higher response and conversion 
• Make offers with Yes/No response 

Reaching out to the customer in this digital age has become so much easy but converting them into loyal customers is an arduous task. While print media marketing might be costlier than digital marketing, it is an effective technique of retaining customers. Increase customer’s loyalty, bolster conversion and ramp up ROI by making direct mail one of your marketing techniques
 
 
Caryl Anne is a contributing writer and media specialist for Allegra Network. She often produces content for a variety of print marketing blogs. 

Identifying Your Best Sales Leads

In order to come up with the most responsive direct mail list you’ve got to know something about your best customers. How do you do that? Here’s the secret: Simply find people with the same demographic characteristics of your best customers.

To learn how, let’s review the factors that make up a direct mail campaign and see where customer profiling fits in.

Before the vast use of the internet to reach potential customers, direct mail was king of the marketing world.  It’s true  a lot of business marketing and advertising strategists are adding more online campaigns to their mix these days, making traditional offline campaigns seem outdated and ineffective.  But with the wide use of the internet and it’s low to no cost to enter, is offline marketing and direct mail really dead?

Just the other day as I sat outside, I noticed the majority of my neighbors coming home only to stop by the communal mailbox to grab their snail mail.  If what lands in that mailbox is so unimportant, so unexciting to receive and so ineffective as sales pieces, why do we still stop at our mailbox each day to see what’s in there?
Has Direct Mail Been Replaced?

There has been an ongoing debate about whether or not direct mail is dead. The jury is still out despite the “hyper” hype about the internet, email marketing and how much less it costs to send virtual mail.  After all, it isn’t so much about the overall cost of a campaign as it is the effectiveness of the piece in relation to the cost.  You could send 100 emails to customers with little or not sales or you could send a direct mail piece that yields a high return.  Is your goal to get traffic and make sales or is it to flood cyberspace with free campaigns that bring in zero dollars.

Email Versus Direct Mail

Email is supposed to be the preferred way of getting your advertising message out to masses of people on your list.  It is supposed to be cheaper to execute, doesn’t irritate the recipient by the ugly “junk” mail that lands in their real mailbox and is more efficient because you can measure ROI metrics within minutes of doing an email blast.

The assumption, however, is that since you sent an email campaign, it must mean that everyone on your list opens it and reads the clever words you’ve used to entice them to buy.  Yet, emails can go unopened and they can go unread – possibly much easier than direct mail.  At least with direct mail, the recipient has to take the piece inside his house to throw it away.
At least he’s read it.

Direct Mail Still Gets High Marks

One key factor as to why direct mail works better than email is the list.  While you can rent a prospect list in the online world, there’s a 20 percent undeliverability rate from these online lists for the internet marketing crowd. Reason is there are more spam filters, corporate firewalls are set even tighter to keep out even legitimate emails and there’s a higher frequency of the recipient to mass delete emails for fear of email overload.  Direct mail, on the other hand gets almost a 95 percent deliverability rate because good list managers scrub their lists on a regular basis.

Finally, with email, you only get about two seconds or less to get the attention of the receiver or it gets deleted. Direct mail gives you a good five seconds or more to catch the attention of the receiver.  That’s huge!

Your marketing strategies should include a mix of online and offline campaigns in order to reach maximum effectiveness.  The fact is direct mail still works and it works well.