If
your business relies on direct mail (DM) as one of the acquisition vehicles,
you are probably in the perpetual cycle of justifying its ROI. DM (postcards,
letters, etc.) is not cheap and with all the junk that a typical household
receives through the mailbox, it is challenging to expect any better. The piece
of paper in hand, however, still gets some attention, if/when the reader can
actually “separate the wheat from the chaff.” Nothing we can do about it,
right?
May
be, in the times gone by; we now have a plethora of communication vehicles
available to connect with our customers. Can we employ a few of these vehicles
to influence reader behavior, such that we get an extra second or an extra
eyeball on our direct mailers? The answer is yes, it does help!
I
recently employed a time-managed campaign strategy to assess the impact of DM
ROI, where the mail drops were followed by an email campaign to the customers.
The idea was to send a reminder to DM recipients to re-look and/or re-assess
their decision about the DM sent earlier. The chart below shows how the daily
order volume spiked around the email timings.
The
three spikes (circled in red) represent the 3 batches of DM drops. On a closer look, what is interesting is the fact that the spike is ~3 times the average volume pre-campaign,
while a typical DM-ONLY campaign yielded only about twice the lift in order
volume. The next bump (circled in green) is when a reminder email was sent
about a week after the first email. This got some of the “lazies” to act and
respond to the offer. Much better overall ROI, for the time spent in
pre-campaign planning. Such analytics based campaign tactics can help gain a little extra mileage out of our marketing dollars, something we can all rally behind.
