Overview

With the rise of technology usage, marketers have taken advantage of this shift by using the power of digital communication to reach larger audiences. Not to mention, since consumers are more connected digitally than ever before and are spending hours on electronic devices daily, businesses are constantly finding ways to increase their online presence and communications. However, with the surge in digital marketing, consumers are often left feeling digital overload and are overwhelmed by email advertising. Digital overload occurs when one spends too much time consuming info and media via a screen and ends up feeling more distracted, anxious, fatigued, or even depressed.

The increased aversion to digital marketing efforts due to digital overload can cause marketers to face a more difficult time gaining attention from a weary audience. This is where direct mail marketing comes in. It’s certainly not a new channel for marketing, but there are now more efficient and effective ways to manage direct mail campaigns.

What is direct mail?

Direct mail is a form of advertising where physical pieces such as printed mailers, corporate swag, perishable packages, and other forms of dimensional packages are sent directly to potential customers. Direct mail marketing allows a business to engage prospects and customers offline by sending them personalized physical items and messaging. It can be leveraged in a variety of ways by different business functions such as the marketing department, inbound and outbound sales teams, recruiters, and more. In the past several years, direct mail has become a valuable way to connect with prospects and clients in a more meaningful way and has potential to make a big influence when it comes to sales opportunity creation.

Why should companies value having direct mail integrated with a marketing automation platform (MAP)?

If you have the option, integrating your direct mail services with your marketing automation platform will prove beneficial in the long run. Some of the reasons to consider setting up a direct mail integration is to save your business both time, money, and errors that can inevitably occur when rolling out a direct mail campaign. When you have a direct mail integration in place, your marketing ops team can enable processes to manage the user experience of the direct mail service as well as any lead processing measures that need to happen throughout the duration of the direct mail campaign. And the error-free direct mail automation governed by your marketing operations team will ensure that mailers are being sent to the right address and target audience at the right time.

When should a company integrate a direct mail service?

Before completing an integration with a direct mail service, make sure to schedule some time to test the service out by sending your first gift. There are a lot of direct mail services with varying capabilities and costs to choose from, so test out the service you’ve chosen to see if it will result in a performance your team is looking for. It is also critical to build a Direct Mail program template to standardized configuration before you launch your first campaign. This will help create efficiencies in the campaign build process and lock-in best practices for automated processing for future direct mail campaigns.

Top 3 Direct Mail Services

Based on G2 ratings, the following companies are the three most popular direct mail services you can integrate with.

Sendoso

• Sendoso can integrate with the following marketing automation platforms: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Marketo, HubSpot, and Eloqua.
• The goal of Sendoso’s direct mail strategy is to drive revenue growth and improve customer retention.
• With Sendoso Direct Marketing Automation Platform, customers can create highly personalized, automated and meaningful direct mail experiences. These highly tailored campaigns will hopefully drive ROI as you find more ways to connect with your buyers during their customer lifecycle journey.
• On average, Sendoso clients see a 4x increase in response rates, over 200% return on campaign investment, and 20+ hours saved per campaign

Reachdesk

• Reachdesk can integrate with the following marketing automation platforms: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Marketo, HubSpot, and Eloqua.
• Reachdesk positions themselves as a global gifting platform for connection-building teams. They believe that “gifting is all about how you make people feel” and their data-driven insights can reveal what works best for your audience- ensuring the team to make better decisions about the gifting strategy. Ultimately, by delivering on moments that matter, you’re able to build deeper connections with the gift recipients.
• Based on previous and current client success stories, Reachdesk helped to deliver over 480% ROI, 9x higher response rates, 42% increase in virtual event attendance, 15% increase in demo call show rates, and an increase in close rate by 19%.

Lob

• Lob can integrate with Salesforce and the following marketing automation platforms: Marketo and HubSpot.
• Lob prides itself for having an “intelligent” direct mail service, where their platform, out-of-the-box analytics, and print delivery network can execute direct mail campaigns at any frequency and scale- from one to millions.
• The Lob platform can make advanced personalization and localization efforts easily and with no coding required.
• Lob states that their customers can see north of 40% increase in conversion rates with their platform. Their customer case studies show several examples of how companies were able to benefit from Lob’s intelligent direct mail.

How can you implement and manage direct mail in a MAP?

Most direct mail services will have a guide to walk you through the process on how to integrate with your desired marketing automation platform. Additionally, the direct mail service should have customer support available to answer any questions you may have. As with any new implementation with a vendor, you want to make sure that you bring in relevant stakeholders early into the decision-making process. Direct mail campaigns are typically more costly, so gaining support from the broader team might be crucial in moving forward.

Conclusion

If your team is looking to create meaningful connections with your prospects, clients, and employees, then starting a direct mail campaign would be worth looking into. As with most sales interactions, timing is everything- and that goes for direct mail as well. If you can invest in a direct mail service that integrates with your MAP tool, you’ll find the process of gift-gifting more hassle-free. And the insights and performance metrics that most direct mail services provide can further ensure that your money is being spent wisely and with clear intention.