Automated Postcard Mailing
Getting Started with Automated Postcards Mailing
When employed correctly, Postcards can be your best friend when effectively reaching out to your target audience and boosting your conversion rates. When a Postcard is sent to the right person at the right time, it is bound to get you positive results. Automated postcards are perfect for introducing new services/products to your target audience; they are also pretty effective for pitching new sales or offers from your business.
An occasional postcard included in your ongoing drip communication with your existing customers can do wonders for your drip marketing campaigns. Perhaps what really works in favor of postcards when it comes to marketing is the fact that people are tired of seeing the same old marketing messages everywhere they turn, figuratively speaking. We are bombarded with marketing messages so much that we have grown to ignore them naturally.
On the other hand, postcards have a personal touch to them, and it is hard to ignore, like a text message or email that you can leave unread in your inbox. Furthermore, by personalizing the postcards you send out to each of your target audience, you can form an emotional connection with them. Sending out postcards to your customers may be relatively easy and straightforward when your target audience is limited to a short number and can be efficiently implemented.
However, If your business or your target audience is in the hundreds or more, personalizing the postcards for each, having them printed, and getting them mailed to the recipients can be hard. And no matter how hard you try, there will be some error as long as it is manually by your staff. Today’s marketing campaigns are streamlined to include the maximum number of people in your target audience who fit well into your buyer persona. Hence even small-scale businesses often end up having an extensive audience for their campaigns.
This article discusses how you can make use of automated postcard mailing for streamlining your marketing efforts. The article takes you through the various aspects of automated postcard mailing, such as how you can personalize it. We further discuss the importance of address verification for sending postcards to your target audience and why you should use an A/B test on different postcard concepts. Finally, we also discuss why it is essential to keep track of engagement and not just limit yourself to tracking response rate.
Personalize Automated Postcard Mailing
Direct mail has gained more and more popularity ever since automation was made possible for it, along with a lot of other advanced capabilities such as tracking of mails. Although marketers have started to come up with their own unique strategies for the new advanced automated postcard mailing, most of them still forget one of the basic operations they need to do, which is to personalize their direct mails and postcards in particular.
Why Personalize Postcards?
Personalization is an important step towards optimizing your direct mail campaign, and it is more significant for direct postcard mail because they often include attractive pictures on one side. Personalizing your postcards can have a massive impact on your marketing efforts, and it has already become a norm to personalize your digital marketing efforts. With advanced direct mail tools available in the market, such as PostGrid, you can easily customize your postcard mailing.
So, at this point, if you are still not personalizing your postcard mailing despite the fact that you have easy access to advanced direct mail tools like PostGrid, then you’ve only got yourself to blame. With systems as advanced as PostGrid, you can personalize the postcards every aspect from the content you use, the image you feature, and other design elements you want to include in it. This means you can fully personalize each and every one of the postcards you send to your target audience.
Integrating With CRM
With the right developer, you can even integrate fully automated direct mail solutions like PostGrid with your CRM and make direct mail marketing significantly easier for yourself. This means that you plug in data directly and effortlessly make fully customized postcards.
Furthermore, direct access to such data brings whole new possibilities for your direct mail efforts. You can even include pictures of products or services that are of interest to the audience after accessing the customer’s purchase history or abandoned cart statuses.
Behavioral Triggers
Another advantage you can make use of advanced direct mail solutions is by setting behavioral triggers within your CRM. These triggers will enable you to send out super relevant postcards to your customers based on customer events. If you have ever implemented automated email workflows, then you can probably draw the similarities between the two right now. It is also advisable that you add a postcard trigger to the already existing email sequences.
A/B Test Different Concepts for Postcards
A/B testing is nothing short of a divine blessing for marketers. It has literally changed how businesses carry out their marketing campaigns. A/B testing is also popularly known as split testing or bucket testing. The basics of A/B testing are pretty straightforward; you take two versions of the same product or marketing material you want to use and compare them against each other to find which one performs better.
Defining A/B Test
A/B testing can be defined as the experiment in which two or more variants of a page or product or, in this case, postcard concepts are presented in front of a user at random for selecting the better version. Apart from the user input, the A/B test also factors in statistical analysis to determine which of the concepts will be more effective with the target audience. The selected version is bound to perform better for that specific conversion goal and target audience.
A/B Testing Postcard Concepts
Now that we know what A/B testing means, it should be easy to apply the same for your direct mail postcards. Several designing and copy practices can help you get your postcards to stand out and make them more attractive to the target audience. However, they can’t tell for sure that a specific design or content can work well in an actual campaign.
A/B testing allows you to test out your ideas and close in on the ideal attributes to be used in the postcard. The attributes that you can close in on include everything from the size of the postcard to its color, its graphics, and much more. By doing so, you can come up with the most effective postcard template that you can use for that specific campaign and target audience.
Track Automated Postcards Engagement and Response Rate
Most, if not all, advanced direct mail solutions allow you to measure the effectiveness of your direct mail campaigns. It is high time that marketers stop treating direct mail like some old-school method for grabbing the attention of their target audience. Direct mail has come a long way since its inception, and if you thought full-automation is the ned of it you couldn’t be more wrong.
Over the years, direct mail, including postcards, has adapted modern solutions or rather teamed up with them to provide the marketers with a much more streamlined marketing experience. Tracking of direct mail is one of the new capabilities that has resulted from this teaming up of direct mail with modern tech. The direct mail employed today is not just automated but also interactive, testable, and trackable.
Methods to Track Mail Performance
With the advanced capabilities that we have today, we have more than one way to track the performance of direct mail campaigns. Below we discuss some of the more popular methods that you can use on your postcards to track mail performance.
QR Code
The QR codes are the obvious number one choice when it comes to tracking your mail campaigns. Why? Because they are ridiculously convenient and convenience has a way of encouraging people to take the desired action. Apart from convenience, QR codes are also preferred because they can also be personalized and is ideal for postcards as they take up very little space. After scanning the QR code, the user gets navigated to a landing page or your own website, from where it is easy to track the performance of the mail campaign.
PURL or Personalized URL
PURLs or personalized URLs are just as effective in tracking your mail performance as QR codes. However, as you may have already figured out, it is not as convenient as QR codes because it does require you to type in the URL. But, on the other hand, PURLs often have the name of the recipient in them, which raises their curiosity and generally edges them to visit the URL. It’d be best if you can personalize the landing page they visit to include the user’s name. The rest of the tracking works similar to the QR codes, and you can even use your website’s CRM for advanced insights.
Special Discount Coupons
Special discount coupons are made unique for each customer or target audience, and they are a great way to encourage conversions too. This is a great way to reach out to your target audience, and the prospect of a reward should be enough to at least drive them to visit your website. Once the user enters the unique discount code on your website or landing page, it is very easy to track them.
Why Use a Smart Method for Tracking
The methods stated above make use of smart solutions for tracking your direct mails. However, you can also opt for a more traditional approach such as dedicated telephone lines or an 800 number for tracking. That being said, it is highly recommended that you make use of a method that allows you to measure effectiveness in a holistic manner. Using a smart solution like QR code or PURLs enables you to track the first action instead of just point-of-sale, which is ideal for getting a comprehensive idea of the campaign’s performance. You can track the individual engagement of the campaigns using a trackable URL and not just limit yourself to the data on response rate.
Conclusion
Automated postcard mailings have fast gained popularity and for good reasons. Direct mail has always been a reliable way of reaching out to the target audience, and even among direct mails, postcards often managed to create a sense of emotional connection with the recipients. With automation, postcard mailing for businesses took direct mail marketing to a new level. Personalization is the key to the success of automated postcard mailing for businesses. For optimal results, you also need to incorporate practices such as A/B testing and closely track the campaign’s engagement and response rate.
To automate postal mailing with these advanced capabilities, you also need an advanced direct mailing solution such as PostGrid. A smart, direct mail solution like PostGrid not only lets you automate the entire direct mail process but also allows tracking of mailpieces along with full customization of your postcards. Additionally, PostGrid also comes equipped with an advanced address verification capability, enabling you to make sure that the postcards are delivered every time. PostGrid’s deliverability rate of 99% combined with advanced tracking and personalization capacity ensures the best result for your marketing campaign.
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