With much of the marketing world focusing on digital methods of consumer engagement, there’s a sizable opportunity to gain market share via direct mail. But the decreased competition for mailbox space is just one small factor in the power of direct marketing. Modern technology makes it easy for you to use individualized marketing strategies to fuel your direct mail efforts, enabling you to have the best of both worlds. One of the most natural avenues for this type of direct mail synergy is direct mail retargeting, which can significantly boost the effectiveness of your marketing spend.

Connecting Digital with Direct Mail

One of the major challenges faced by today’s marketers is appealing to younger generations. The common perception is that this audience prefers digital messages to reflect their technology-based lifestyle. However, the numbers show that this isn’t entirely accurate. In fact, According to CNBC, “Generation Z is likely to avoid advertising by using ad blockers and skipping content.” So, what’s the solution to capture the consideration of people who grew up in this generation?

Audience selection is a vital part of marketing, and it’s every marketer’s responsibility to put their messaging in front of the people who are most likely to respond to them. If you’ve been viewing younger generations in strictly digital terms, direct mail isn’t much of a stretch. The two mediums are actually linked much more closely than you might think.

Many companies currently use automated emails to keep in touch with their customers. This is especially true when companies think an individual may be close to making a purchase. For example, Amazon (among many other retailers) typically emails a consumer when they look at an item without buying it. It’s a non-invasive reminder that the consumer had an item on their mind and that they may want to come back and complete the purchase. Direct mail allows you to carry out a similar action with the use of direct mail retargeting.

Have an increasing amount of email opt-outs these days? All is not lost for this segment of prospects, reach them via direct mail after a site visit.

By using direct mail retargeting, you can mail postcards to the homes of people who have visited your site and are ready to buy within 48 hours. It provides the reach and responsiveness of direct mail, with the real-time data-driven approach commonly seen in digital marketing, giving you a truly powerful one-two punch.

Postcards and Individualization

By definition, direct mail retargeting is made-to-order, individualized marketing messages to consumers. There’s nothing cookie-cutter about a sales presentation that focuses exactly on what a customer wants, when they want it. It’s hard to get more individualized than that.

If there’s something the consumer wants above all else, it’s to be truly understood by the businesses he or she supports. The customer experience is just as important as the product itself, and if the customer doesn’t have a positive experience, they’ll seek out a different company the next time they’re ready to make a purchase. Therefore, anything you can do to get ahead of the pack — while simultaneously pivoting your marketing towards a less cluttered landscape — can only help you to stand out in the marketplace.

Direct mail retargeting provides a truly individualized approach at a time when individualization has never been more important. Instead of delivering a common message to your entire audience, you can now give your audience the direct interaction they deserve, while also showing these individuals how well you know and understand them. It’s a win-win for any company that wants to stay relevant in the digital age. No matter what industry you work in, direct mail retargeting can give you the individual touch you need to enhance the customer experience.

In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Total Retail and NaviStone, individualization is happening. Only 4 percent of the brands we surveyed are not currently personalizing their direct mail campaigns.

There are a couple of challenges that retailers must overcome to realize the full potential of their personalization efforts. The first is eliminating data siloes within their organizations. Too many brands lack integrated technology systems to tie customer data sources from all channels to a single customer profile, limiting the amount of personalization that can be used.

The Reward for Getting Personalization Right

Perhaps not surprisingly, brands most value the revenue that personalized marketing generates. In our study with Total Retail, nearly 70 percent of respondents said their brand is generating a higher conversion rate when personalizing its direct mail retargeting campaigns vs. a generic mailing sent to all.

Postcards and Customer Re-Engagement

A name that exists in a company’s active file, but has no current data behind it, provides no new actionable insights. Everyone knows that data and the understanding of customers dictate a company’s ability to reach people on an individual level. So how do you, as a marketing director, develop a sufficient data set that allows you to get to know a lapsed customer well enough to market to them individually?

Fortunately, direct mail retargeting gives you the ability to do exactly this. While we know that data rules in marketing, we also know that direct mail has a much greater response rate than any digital form of marketing.

In fact, well over 50 percent of respondents in our study are seeing either much higher or somewhat higher conversion rates and ROI for direct mail vs all other digital channels, including email, social media, paid search, SMS, content, video, affiliate, and display.

When asked how their marketing budgets will change for a litany of channels in the next 12 months, 60 percent of respondents said they will be increasing spending on direct mail.

There are two major takeaways here. First, direct mail is your avenue for reaching former customers. Once you reach out to them, you can start to develop the data necessary to truly bring these individuals back into the fold. Second, you can begin your approach by using direct mail retargeting. The cost-effectiveness of postcards makes this a far more natural medium for reaching out to a lapsed customer than a catalog that’s expensive to produce and send. Furthermore, you can use a QR code or a custom URL to track that individual’s response to your postcard. It’s the perfect marriage of digital data collection with the effectiveness of traditional direct mail.

Businesses have traditionally tried to leverage past order histories in order to pitch former customers. Predictably, these efforts can only go so far in an age when your customers expect an individualized experience with every interaction with your company. In order to really reach your audience, you have to know what they want now. Direct mail retargeting moves you much closer to re-engaging customers than anything that’s come before, giving you the opportunity to get to know these consumers all over again.

A Winning Proposition for Everyone

When you think about what customers seek in a business, it’s clear that direct mail retargeting is the ultimate solution. This medium shows consumers that you care about them, and it does so in a way that doesn’t get lost in the clutter of emails or social media posts. For your business, direct mail retargeting allows you to reach out to consumers in a way that gets their attention and that has a much higher response rate than digital means. They represent a persuasive tool for customers and an innovative and affordable way for businesses to increase their reach. It’s a winning proposition for everyone.