.png)
The leaves are changing, it’s getting colder, and marketers everywhere are putting the final touches on their holiday marketing strategy. As is typical this time of year, the next couple of months are expected to see heavy investments in online marketing channels from paid ads to email and everything in between. That means it’ll be hard to stand out from everyone else vying for consumer attention. Direct Mail offers a great way to reach your audience in a less saturated channel, helping your messaging stand out and increasing the likelihood of recipients converting. Plus, you’ll pay a flat cost per piece that doesn’t increase due to higher competition, as it does with online channels.
In short, if you haven’t already, Direct Mail is a prime channel to add to your mix for the holidays and can help you bridge your online and offline marketing efforts. Here’s our DM holiday marketing guide to help you get the most out of Q4:
Poplar’s Lookalike capabilities enable you to quickly build and mail custom Lookalike models based on your customer list. Poplar clients can also build custom audiences based on demographics, specific geography, and interests.
Our expedited modeling process and quick printing turnaround makes it possible to get a prospecting campaign in-home in around 2 weeks, allowing you to still make an impact for the holidays.
This is a great time of year to reactivate lapsed customers since they’ll be in the buying mindset and most brands have promotions available to entice them to come back. This is especially true for previous holiday purchasers since they have a high likelihood or converting again during the holidays.
Another powerful strategy we’ve seen work in the past is to target gift recipients of your products. These people probably like your company but haven’t purchased for themselves yet, which presents a unique opportunity to convert them as customers who might even be buying gifts for someone else.
Black Friday is obviously a huge moment for the majority of our clients, and we've seen them use the Poplar platform to support their Black Friday marketing efforts successfully in a few ways.
Hype up your Black Friday/Cyber Monday and other holiday sales with a pre-sale mailer that gives recipients early access to the sale. This will encourage more people to hold on to the mailers then shop the sale. You could even give a bigger special discount to mailer recipients.
You can even target your email unsubscribers. This is a good way to convert these people who won't be receiving your sales messaging through the normal email channel during the holidays but can still respond quite strongly to offline marketing.
Design best practices for direct mail aren’t that different from email or other digital channels: you’ll want to keep the designs simple and focus on major value props, while clearly presenting your offer and call to action.
Traditional Direct Mail isn’t always a great channel for last-minute marketing campaigns, but Poplar allows you to get mailers in-home in around 1-2 weeks. One thing to note is that we do expect delays around the holidays from the USPS because of increased demand, so please factor in a few additional days right around Black Friday and Cyber Monday for delivery.
The conversion curve for Direct Mail can be longer than digital channels since it may take some days for people to check their mail and respond. That’s why we recommend erring on the side of sending early to ensure your mailers hit homes with enough time to convert people before the holidays are over. We also do not recommend trying to time a mailer to hit exactly on a specific day like Black Friday since it's extremely difficult to be that accurate with how busy the USPS is during that time period.
Poplar is a product of Share Local Media
