Most business owners will understand the importance of marketing to bolster sales, increase the size of their customer base, and generally increase their reputation in their industry. There are so many ways in which marketing can benefit your business, so setting this as a high priority is essential.

Even if you feel as though you’ve got your marketing in a great state, there are still so many more things that a business owners can do to make sure they’re getting the most out of their social media posts and marketing campaigns. A popular approach to marketing that is making more of a comeback today is that of direct mail. Giving your potential customers physical marketing materials can actually be much more useful than you think, and here are some reasons why.

People Still Enjoy Physical Items

Many of us still enjoy items with tangibility, as they can feel much more personal and specific to us. Email spam today has become so frequent, with over 85% being categorized as spam, that most of our emails never get read at all. Not only that but there are also so many advertisements we see when scrolling through social media, that it may make you feel entirely numb to these types of marketing.

Receiving a physical letter or flyer from your mailbox can give you a sense of more control. If you really want to, you can throw it away without opening it. However, we instinctively want to open mail, as it may contain important information. Mail has never had to rely on eye-catching subject titles to entice people to open it. Instead, people will open the envelope, and that’s where the countdown begins. You’ll want them to then feel inclined to keep reading which is another task altogether.

The fact that they’ve opened it and had a look at your marketing material means that you’ve accomplished far more with this direct mail than you would from an email that’s been filtered straight into spam folders.

More Direct Marketing

When sending out mass marketing emails and posting on social media, your reach may be very wide, but you lose a level of effectiveness when this ends up being seen by people that aren’t in your target audience at all. Whereas if you use direct mail advertising, you can specifically choose addresses to send your products to and record exactly how many people these were sent to and easily identify what your reach was.

On top of that, you can even find out how many people have interacted with that mail by analyzing the number of people that have used discount codes, visited unique links, or scanned QR codes for example. To be certain that your mail is going to the right places, especially overseas, you should be using quality international address verification. Without tech that informs you if an address is valid or viable for delivery, you could be wasting a lot of resources sending mail that will never get to the intended receiver.

Avoid The Spam Folders

The chances are, most people are going to look through their physical mail every day and will even take a glance at flyers and junk mail just as often as bills. Sending your direct mail to your customers that recognize your branding instantly gets you more recognition than if your emails ended up in a spam folder.

To further increase the chances of people taking the time to read through your direct mail, make sure it’s eye-catching and that the message is obvious. Even with physical mail, you’ll need to try to keep the reader’s attention similarly with digital marketing material or it will just end up in the trash.

Combine Direct Mail With Other Mediums

No approach to marketing should be your sole focus. You need to be playing every angle to get the best response from your audience. While direct mail is a fantastic tool to promote your products and services, it’s best to use this in conjunction with other mediums.

A successful campaign requires many different avenues from social media engagement to website content, and it’s a great idea to link all of these together. For example, in your direct mail, add QR codes to send people to your website or social media platforms, encouraging them to follow your business. Using mail to get people to properly engage with you and your team online is a fantastic way of uniting these different marketing methods. As well as having people scan QR codes, there are so many other things you can do with your direct mail.

While it can be used in an invitational sense by directing people to your social channels, you can even use this medium to offer discounts and vouchers which work in two ways. First of all, they have a chance of boosting sales of your products and services, but they also give you a good idea of how many people are interacting with your direct mail compared to how many were sent out.

Image Credits:

Image 1: Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Image 2: Photo by Direct Media on StockSnap