Better Email Marketing using Direct Mail

Better email marketing starts with better lists

A recent study that was highlighted over at MarketingCharts.com showed many of the ways that marketers today are working to make sure that their email lists are of the highest quality. With the huge investment in email marketing that brands and smb’s are making, and the risks associated with developing a poor deliverability score with ISP’s, the costs associated with poor list quality have escalated. In fact, the survey states “With respondents saying that the quality of their subscribers is as important as overall ROI when gauging their email program’s effectiveness”. As a result of the understanding that list quality is so important to the success of email marketing, marketers have utilized a plethora of techniques to both capture accurate email addresses from likely responders as well as update those addresses (people change jobs – alot) to keep their lists growing and accurate.

Better email marketing using direct mail

Looking at the survey details, one surprising finding is that marketers aren’t focusing on better email marketing using direct mail as a list building and cleansing tactic. The use of direct mail doesn’t even crack the top 15 tactics that marketers are deploying to build and update their email lists. While it certainly makes sense for brands to make it as easy as possible to add or update an email address while online or while speaking with an employee, the fact remains that on average 70% of the emails sent by businesses are never opened. While batting .300 is great for a major league baseball player, most of us would agree that failing to reach your audience 7 out of 10 times with your message isn’t anything to be proud of.  According to Axciom, 49% of consumers have email addresses that they don’t check. Why then, aren’t marketers reaching out to email non responders through direct mail to draw them in? Direct mail is proving to be an incredibly efficient means of lead capture and conversion (Online Marketers Institute). In fact, if email targets are repeatedly not opening their mail – doesn’t it make sense to reach out through another channel to make sure that they are still there and still interested in your brand? Perhaps there hasn’t been an easy, cost effective way to figure out who to mail to in the middle of a campaign, and to set up a way for those targets to respond with their current email addresses. 

Use Drip Marketing to reach out to email non responders

Using lightweight, easy to use marketing automation software, marketers are able to develop multichannel marketing campaigns that have few simple automation rules set up to quickly identify the members of a list that haven’t responded.  Drip campaigns watch the email list to see who hasn’t opened, and create a campaign segment for those non responders. Often the first tactic is to drip new emails out to non responder segments with revise the subject lines and offers. This will normally pick up an additional 4-8% opens.   The next step is to try engage the remaining non responders through a different channel. When integrated with a well designed personalized URL and personalized landing page, simple, effective postcard mailings can drive those non responders online where, in return for a coupon or something of value, they can enter or update their email address to one that they check more frequently while as they begin engaging in the campaign.

Email and Direct Mail can and should work together

To often, marketing campaigns end up being held hostage by the channel that they are being primarily driven through. The idea of a campaign is to reach targets with a consistent, clear message that drives action and builds brand equity, regardless of the communication means. By thinking just a little bit out of the box, marketers are able to use channels like email and direct mail together to maximize the impact and reach of their campaigns. Well designed, lightweight marketing automation can help make list building and cleansing easier processes for brands and agencies to implement.