When marketing to millennials, it’s important to integrate your online and offline marketing efforts.
We recommend taking a synergistic approach to direct marketing that combines digital retargeting with direct mail for the best response.
Think about it: Millennials spend 6 hours per week shopping online, with 67% of Millennials and 56% of Gen Xers preferring to shop online rather than in-store. But you can’t sit and wait for them to find your website, because you might be waiting forever.
The simple fact is that no matter how much time they spend shopping online, they will never visit your website if they are not aware that your brand exists. You have to be proactive in your outreach and introduce your brand to them.
One way to do that is with direct mail. Yes, direct mail. While many people write direct mail off as an old or outdated medium, it’s actually experiencing a 5.1% response rate, the highest response rate in more than a decade.
Plus, statistics show that millennials love direct mail:
- Response rate jumps to 12.4% for people aged 18-21.
- At least 42% of millennials prefer direct mail political ads over online ads, with 38% favoring both equally.
- 66% are more likely to remember to use a voucher if they have a physical copy to carry around.
- 23% bought or ordered something as a result of receiving direct mail in the last 12 months.
- Millennials who live with their parents are 18% more likely than the general population to welcome direct mail and 32% more likely to find it memorable.
And while direct mail outperforms its online counterparts, studies also show that it helps improve their response rate when the channels are planned in conjunction with one another: Marketing campaigns that use direct mail and 1 or more digital media often experience up to 118% lift in response rate compared to using direct mail only. (For more information, check out “6 Things You Didn’t Realize You Already Know About Variable Print Marketing.”)
The key here is that direct mail is the activation point for the online experience. As we said before, millennials will never find your website if they are not aware of your brand. Sending them a postcard with a CTA to visit a link to learn more can be the push they need to get there. And since 90% of people will visit a website before they call or visit a store, there’s a pretty good chance they will be following that link.
Social Media Time Spent By Millennials
- YouTube: 40 minutes a day
- Facebook: 35 minutes a day
- SnapChat: 25 minutes a day
- Instagram: 15 minutes a day
- Twitter: 1 minute a day
Once they are on your site, you can then begin to employ your digital strategies. You can place cookies on your site so you can retarget them on Google, Facebook, and Instagram long after they have left the page. You can track their purchases and send them thank you post cards and emails.
You can even track their abandoned carts and send them communications reminding them to complete their purchase. The point is, once you have them on your website, they are now on your radar (and you are on theirs!)
The Bottom Line
With a projected cumulative $1.4 trillion in spending power by 2020, it’s more important than ever to make sure you are marketing to millennials. And if you’re not marketing to them with direct mail, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to reach prospective customers that just need to be introduced to your brand.
