How to Boost Your Direct Mail Marketing with Big Data

Data-driven marketing has proven itself as a sure-fire way to boost sales and positive brand awareness, supplementing (but not replacing) traditional marketing approaches. For direct mail campaigns, big data analysis can ease the pain of targeting the wrong audience.

Statistics from the DMA show that direct mail marketing is not dead or old-fashioned. Trends from the 2018 DMA statistical fact book indicate that 42% of people read catalogs received in the mail. According to the DMA, in 2016, Customer response rates increased year-over-year by an impressive 43%, but prospect response rates more than doubled ”reporting an astounding 190% increase. One of the reasons for this has been the power of using online browsing behavior to prompt personalized mail.

It’s not that people don’t like direct mail advertising; it’s just that they don’t want their mailbox to be stuffed with reams of paper for products and services they don’t need or want. And they certainly don’t want to have to recycle three copies of the same catalog.

Social media marketing can be bane or boon to brands. It can promote positive customer engagement and create a loyal following. In this way, social media is used by companies to create consumer brand portals, where consumers can like, follow or share with their friends.

Unfortunately, it can also alienate consumers already bombarded with irrelevant and unwelcome sales promotions. Consumers often use social media to vent their irritation and bad experiences. For instance, wasting paper may have the green police knocking on your door. Soon, the three copies of your direct mail ad ”unfavorably rewritten ”are scanned and uploaded to YouTube and you start trending … but not in a good way.

Big data analysis helps organizations to predict response rates before launching a campaign, identify the most amenable target market, and save money by stripping unsuitable mail recipients from the list. Data analytics can also use an organization’s sales history to discover buying trends and spending capacity, and identify historical responses to new products.

Most importantly, data analysis can help to personalize communication with customers, probably one of the most powerful incentives for consumers to maintain brand loyalty in the digital age. Older consumers, for instance, lament the days of mail addressed directly to them and not the home owner, and speaking to humans rather than pressing buttons or filling in online forms to make purchases or lodge complaints.

Big data enables consumer-focused marketing. It can predict trends by gathering tidbits of information about consumers on social media and using machine-learning software to paint a picture of the consumer’s future. Big data analysis uses seemingly innocuous information about people to build an accurate word-image of the consumer most likely to respond to a particular product or service.

For instance, Consumer X has just gotten married, so the products and services that interest them are likely going to change. This is called propensity modeling, a powerful predictive tool used not only to identify the people most likely to respond to a campaign, but to focus on retention activity for consumers who are showing signs of dissatisfaction or life changes.

Big data also allows for location analytics. Imagine creating thousands of flyers to be distributed for a luxury travel campaign in a particular area only to find out (too late) that the local population is income-strapped.

According to InfoTrends, a third of Americans surveyed were more likely to read direct mail than email. The organization found that direct mail is the cornerstone of a multi-touch campaign. So, how do companies cover their bases?

The solution for a multi-channel strategy is an intelligent, easy-to-use brand portal that combines traditional tactics like direct mail within a smart digital strategy. A brand portal provides a centralized zone ”call it a marketing HQ ”that stores and protects brand assets, and gives an organization the ability to manage marketing campaigns from a central location. It also ensures that everyone working on a campaign is kept in the loop.