At its core, digital marketing is all about expanding the reach and driving traffic towards your sales funnel. However, it’s easy to lose sight of the importance of reach when you’re focused on more niche metrics like scroll depth, share of voice, or ad fatigue rate. As such, it may have been some time since you last rolled out a campaign dedicated solely to the purpose of increasing brand exposure.
You can kickstart your digital marketing efforts by investing in more offline marketing. This may sound like a misnomer at first but in the oversaturated world of digital advertising, physical mail can drive traffic to your site and empower your efforts to expand your reach online.
Linking physical mail to digital platforms is easier now than ever before, too. People can use smartphones to scan QR codes for enticing deals or can sign up to receive emails via a scannable link in your mail copy. Doing so creates a greater sense of cohesion between your offline and online marketing efforts and will bolster your marketing strategy.
The Power of Mail Marketing
Many marketers mistakenly believed direct mail marketing was less effective than sending emails or promoting PPC campaigns. In reality, mail marketing offers a terrific ROI and can meaningfully increase your reach online. You can use mail marketing to boost your digital marketing efforts, as people who receive your physical advertisements are far more likely to follow up with an online search for your brand.
Physical mail enjoys a far higher engagement rate, too. 79% of people engage with mail marketing directly, compared to just 45% of those who act on emails. Similarly, research conducted by the Royal Mail shows that 65% of consumers prefer to browse physical catalogs over digital ones.
Creating physical copy can give you a chance to produce more creative copy. You have more room to work with when producing mail marketing and can highlight elements of your brand image — like logos, motifs, and slogans — more effectively when working with physical mediums.
Mail marketing also helps you engage people who aren’t terminally online like most people. This new audience is invaluable if you want to engage a broader range of customers but struggle to figure out where you’ll find your next influx of clients.
You can quickly qualify potential mail-based leads, too. Break down the demographics of your customer base by zip code and utilize existing mail marketing channels (like community newsletters or magazines) to connect with new customers in the area. By tapping into the power of mail marketing, you can find people who aren’t on the web, but still represent highly qualified leads for your brand.
Digitizing Paper Documents
Measuring the impact of mail marketing used to be tricky. You couldn’t stand over consumers’ shoulders as they read their morning mail and couldn’t tell whether your personalized letters had really made an impression on clients. Today, however, that paradigm has changed thanks to the increased ability to digitize your marketing materials.
Get the ball rolling and digitize paper documents. Transferring paper copy to digital pages improves your operational efficiency and gives you greater control over your efforts to produce direct mail that serves your digital marketing campaigns. Scanning physical documents ensures you can quickly scan using optical character recognition technology and will minimize the risk of errors.
Once you’ve digitized your physical print, you can begin efforts to improve cohesion between your direct mail and digital marketing campaigns by:
- Using QR Codes: QR codes offer a seamless transition between physical copy and digital marketing. They reduce the time between your first impression and the follow-up searches that your customers make, too. You can also use QR codes to track traffic and measure the efficacy of your mail marketing.
- Social Media: Directing traffic towards your social media is an easy way to boost your online reach. Offering a gift to those who find your socials via physical mail can increase engagement and help you spot customers who have followed you after receiving mail.
- Apps: Highlight your app in physical print and make it clear that people can gain enticing rewards by signing up with a personalized discount code that you include in a mail copy.
- Emails: Offer easy email sign-up to those who receive your mail copy and send a follow-up message to those who receive your physical ad copy. This brings your brand to the front of consumer’s minds and could improve your conversion rate.
When crafting mail ad copy for online reach, be sure to personalize your note to consumers. Personalization is easier now than ever before, thanks to the increased availability of data online. Simple gestures like including the recipient’s name are great ways to show that you appreciate their custom and want to build upon an existing relationship.
Making the Most of Increased Traffic
Mail marketing can meaningfully boost your online reach. However, you’ll need to act quickly to maximize that increased attention. Get started by creating a cross-channel marketing approach that really works. Effective cross-channel marketing involves:
- Consistent messaging;
- Integrated campaigns;
- Data integration;
- Multi-channel engagement.
Creating a cross-channel marketing approach will likely mean that you need to expand your digital marketing service portfolio. These new offerings can be a real boon for your marketing business, as cross-channel marketing will insulate you against changing market trends.
You can expand into cross-channel marketing today by partnering with other agencies specializing in mail marketing or SEO services. Doing so will give you time to reskill your existing team in order to boost the effectiveness of your digital content creation and mail marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Expanding your online reach with mail marketing is an easy way to give your digital marketing efforts a much-needed boost. You can connect with customers directly by sending physical mail and enjoy a far higher engagement rate when posting materials through the letterbox. By embracing cross-channel strategies, you can also track people who engage with physical materials and measure the effectiveness of your physical advertising copy.
Author Bio
Indiana Lee is a business journalist with expertise in marketing and operational strategies. As a regular contributor to leading business publications, she offers analyses and perspectives on customer engagement and data-driven marketing solutions. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
