With many CRM and email marketers focused more on online marketing, triggered Direct Mail may not be the first channel they think of when looking to expand their paid marketing efforts. Yet Direct Mail can be an extremely powerful addition to a CRM marketer’s arsenal, as it leverages customer data in a similar way to digital channels, while offering a higher response medium that consumers can hold in their hands.
There is no reason to be intimidated by the idea of Triggered Direct Mail, even for someone with no experience in Direct Mail. At its core, the idea is the same as email - you want to reach the right customer at the right time with the right message to get them to take an action you desire. Poplar takes care of all the complexities of Direct Mail (printing, postage, tracking), allowing marketers to focus on the strategy and optimization.
Need more reasons to try out Triggered Direct Mail? Here are five of the top ones.
Let’s face it - email is oversaturated. Brands are racing to send more and more emails to make up for deteriorating response rates, cluttered inboxes, and a general decline in consumer interest in promotional emails. Email still remains an important part of any CRM marketing mix, but there is a growing proportion of customers that simply have stopped paying attention to emails, or even unsubscribed from the brands they shop from.
That brings us to an important point: An email non-opener or unsubscriber can still be a hugely valuable customer. Most likely, they simply don’t like email! They’re likely even open to promotional messages from your brand, they just won’t see them if you send them via email.
Direct Mail, on the other hand, is quite simply very hard to miss. It’s a tangible piece of marketing that arrives in the same inbox with other important messages, and can be far more eye-catching than a single email. Using Poplar to specifically target your customers who have disengaged or unsubscribed from your emails is a great way to make sure they’re still receiving your important promotions and that your brand is staying top of mind.
In this day and age, marketers expect to be able to clearly measure the impact of each of their marketing channels. Facebook and Google provided detailed custom reporting that you can customize and drill deep into the details of. What even many experienced marketers might not realize is that Direct Mail is just as measurable and even more accurate than the vast majority of online marketing attribution options.
Because Direct Mail is sent to a physical address, there are no cookies to clear or clicks to track. Poplar is able to match mailing addresses to the transactional addresses of your customers, providing true 1:1 visibility into the exact orders that your Poplar campaigns are driving. You even have the option to set holdouts, or control groups, to measure the incremental benefit your campaigns are driving.
Not only is Direct Mail extremely measurable, but because you are marketing to the same addresses your customers have already provided to you, it is the most highly targetable of any marketing channel. You can pick and choose the exact customers you want to send your mailers to in each segment and the right message for that individual. Since Poplar has no minimums, you don’t have to worry about reaching a specific threshold in order to send out your first mailing.
Direct Mail used to be best known for mass catalogs sent out to customers, showcasing every product a brand had to offer. There was nothing “personal” about the mailings at all - a high value customer in NYC would likely receive the exact same mailer as a one-time customer from Florida. Not only were these mailings wasteful in terms of who they were sent to, but the lack of any sort of personalization meant that the response was never going to be as high as it could be.
With Poplar, marketers can leverage their customer data to fully personalize each piece of mail they send out - giving each customer a mailer that showcases the right information for them. Whether it’s something as simple as including the customer’s first name and city in your message to them or as complex as pulling in images of their favorite products, you can make sure that you’re sending a mailer that will drive a higher response, making the customer feel more connected with your brand.
To take advantage of the personalization features of Poplar, you’d simply design your creative in HTML, similar to an email. Poplar offers templates and best practice guides to make it as easy as possible to get started.
Other platforms either require you to start from scratch, creating entirely new workflows and segmentation, or they’re complete blackboxes that want you to trust a mysterious behind-the-scenes algorithm. Neither approach is great - you’re choosing between giving up control or duplicating previous efforts.
Poplar’s easy integrations allow you to take advantage of all the work you’ve already done in your CRM efforts. You don’t need to start from scratch setting up new workflows, creating new audience segments, or figuring out complex ways to tie your channels together. And because you’re building off your own existing work, you have full control over the channel - no mysteries and no wasted effort. Want to add direct mail to your reactivation efforts? No problem - with most integrations you can simply add a new Poplar event to the reactivation email series you already have running.
Using Poplar’s powerful integrations gives you the best of both worlds - full control without all the extra effort.
You’ll never find any surprises with your contracts or billing with Poplar. Our low flat cost-per-piece pricing is easy to understand, and there are absolutely no long term commitments or minimums on the platform. No matter what your budget, you can mail on Poplar right away. Mail 1 piece, 10, 100, or 100,000 - you’ll still never find any surprises in your billing.
The biggest hurdle to being successful with Direct Mail as a marketer these days is overcoming preconceived notions about what Direct Mail can do. It’s a powerful, measurable, effective, and quite frankly, fun channel to manage. Using a platform like Poplar allows you to take full control and immediately start sending out Direct Mail to enhance your results and engage more closely with your customers.
