Direct Mail is a powerful channel to grow not only online but also offline in-store sales and traffic. Driving existing customers and leads to your physical locations can increase their AOV and overall awareness of your brand, since a store is much more interactive than a website. Poplar’s location based features can help you automate targeting and content personalization in order to drive in-store sales and support your physical store efforts.
You can specify an area or state to suppress mailing to, so if someone triggers a campaign but is in a suppression area, they won’t receive a mailer from you.
Using dynamic HTML design, you can customize the postcard/letter content based on where the recipient lives.
One way to take advantage of Poplar’s location-based features is to send personalized postcards or letters to your existing customers or leads if they live near one of your physical locations.
You can set a radius around each of your stores to customize what is sent to recipients who live within that radius.
For example, using dynamic HTML design you can send a mailer with local store details like address, hours, and any store-specific promotions to recipients within the radius you designate and you can drive anyone outside of the radius to your website.
This location-based personalization can be automated with Poplar, which makes it especially helpful for clients with many stores around the country.
Sometimes, the best way to drive in-store shopping is to have store-specific promotions. You can easily send postcards with an in-store promotion to customers who live close to your physical locations.
It’s important to let your customers know of any openings or closures of your stores in their area, and sending them emails or texts won’t get everyone’s attention. Sending direct mail enables you to have a physical marketing touch point with your customers and increase awareness of any changes to local store information. Whether you’re reopening or launching brand new stores, adding direct mail to your marketing mix for the announcement will increase your reach and drive people to your stores.
Similarly, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, if you have to suddenly close any stores or change the way a store operates (e.g. curbside pickup only, local deliveries, etc.), you can easily notify all your customers who live close to a store.
Now that stores are slowly beginning to reopen, it could be helpful to show your customers what precautions you’re taking to keep them safe in the store, including how cleaning policies have changed, if you’re adding extra training and protections for employees, or any other policies you’ve added to keep everyone safe.
Overall, the creative’s main goal should be to move recipients to a physical point of sale.
