Tag Archive for: Direct Mail

post-event marketing

Why Direct Mail Should Be Part Of Your Post-Event Marketing

So your trade show was a big success! You and your team had fun. The event helped you capture a lot of leads. Great! But your journey is just beginning. Now is the time to consider your post-event marketing strategy.

You captured leads at the trade show. Now, post-event, you need to nurture those leads. For that, you want an approach that involves multiple marketing channels. You have already harnessed the power of connecting with your leads face to face.

Now it’s time to leverage email, social media and content marketing.

Why not use another channel that has proven to be very effective at post-event marketing: direct mail?

Direct Mail Is Dead! Or Is It?

I have a pretty good idea what you are thinking: “Direct mail? Are you kidding me? Everyone knows that digital marketing is the way to go. Direct mail is dead!”

Is direct mail really dead? That’s what the digital marketing “conventional wisdom” might tell us, but maybe it’s not true. Plenty of B2B marketers like you are successfully harnessing the power of direct mail to help them nurture leads and boost sales results.

Direct mail marketing works!

According to one study, “direct mail proved the most effective advertising media. It outperformed digital channels consistently – and, in some cases, significantly. These findings suggest that while the digital space provides essential platforms for customer interaction, physical media is better suited to close the marketing-sales loop, or the gap between interaction and action.”

To quote marketing strategist and author, Elaine Fogel, “According to the Rain Group, half of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted by direct mail, 3rd out of a list of nine outreach methods.”

And…surprise, surprise! Apparently, even tech-obsessed millennials love direct mail:

“It’s been found that millennials who spend more time with physical ads have a stronger emotional response, leading to better memory of them. You could be on the list of the next generation’s most-loved advertising campaigns by optimizing your use of direct mail.” 

Direct mail can indeed be a powerful addition to your post-event marketing. Combine it well with digital marketing channels such as email and social media, and you can enjoy a powerful synergy that drives your results even higher.

But you have to do it right. So let’s talk about how to do direct mail right.

Omnichannel Post-Event Marketing: Be Everywhere

A Proven Way To Fail With Direct Mail. Hint: Don’t Do This

We’ve all received direct mail marketing pieces we threw in the trash without even opening them. Why didn’t we? For one thing, they probably had a very generic, bland, “corporate” look to them. They were obvious solicitations, and in addition to looking like they came from a big, impersonal company that cared nothing about us, the envelope gave us little incentive to open it.

If we did read it, we were not impressed. The letter’s content was focused on the company and how wonderful its products were, instead of where attention needed to be placed – on us! It did not empathetically focus on our problem and helping us solve it. It merely peddled a product.

“Letters From Grandma”

So what should you do instead? How do you make your direct mail stand out in a positive way from the onslaught of corporate “junk mail” your leads are receiving? Choose a marketing service that supports adding handwritten letters to an automated post-event marketing workflow. Then, take additional steps to make your letter personal. Make it look like a “letter from Grandma”.

Think about it: any letter or piece of mail that looks personal, that appears as if it came from an old friend or family member, is almost guaranteed to get opened.

What do these letters have in common? A handwritten address on the envelope. A “real” stamp, not one from a postage meter. When you open it, you read a conversational message written to an audience of one. You see a word you love: “you”! We all love to hear or read the words “you” and “your”. 

“Great To Meet You!”

Want to give your post-event direct mail an even more personal touch that will help you nurture your leads better? Mention your shared experience, the event itself. Talk about how much you enjoyed meeting and visiting with them. Reference something specific from your in-person conversation, especially as it relates to their problem and how you can help them solve it.

Don’t Forget About Postcards 

Why not consider using postcards in addition to, or even in place of letters? Postcards get attention. They are a visible, tangible reminder of your brand and your products to your trade show leads. Here’s a great benefit of postcard marketing: it’s easier for you to get your message to your readers. Why? They have to open a letter. But, a postcard catches a reader’s attention from the moment it comes into view.

A big part of post-event marketing success is building Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) in your audience. Done right, postcard marketing can help you do this. Postcards catch attention at the mailbox. Your message is likely to get read. There’s a good chance your leads will hang onto your postcard and leave it on their desk.

The result? Every time they see your postcard they think of you. If they think about you often enough, who will they most likely contact when they are ready to buy? You!

What’s Your Ultimate Goal With Direct Mail?

Remember that your ultimate goal with post-event marketing and lead nurturing is to convert your reader into your customer. So keep moving them through your marketing/sales pipeline. At the end of each direct mail piece, have a call to action that encourages them to take the next step in the buyer’s journey.

This may be directing them to make a phone call. It may be telling them about a personalized URL where they can join your email list and download your latest whitepaper. It may be a big announcement about an exciting live event you are hosting.

With direct mail or any other marketing communication, your call to action is crucial. It pays to discover more about this fascinating and potentially profitable topic.

Bottom line: always remember that your goal with direct mail is to drive the lead nurturing process forward and convert your reader into a paying customer.

Your Post-Event Marketing Toolbox

As with all of your marketing initiatives, think of the lead nurturing you do as if it were a construction project. It’s absurd to think you could build a house with only one tool, right? You need a well-equipped toolbox. The same thing goes for your trade show-related lead capture and nurturing.

Think omnichannel marketing, rather than one-channel marketing. As we’ve discussed today, direct mail can be one of your most effective post-event marketing channels.

You can win at direct mail marketing. Lead Liaison’s marketing automation capabilities can help you. We’ll make designing your next mail campaign easy. Want to find out more? Get in touch today!

Marketing Automation Upstart Lead Liaison to Partner with Direct Mail Manager

New Partnership Yields More Powerful Direct Mail Marketing Options as Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Marketing becomes More Important

Allen, TX – Lead Liaison to partner with Direct Mail Manager. Lead Liaison, a privately held provider of marketing automation solutions, is pleased to announce its latest partnership with Direct Mail Manager, a direct mail marketing and handling company. Lead Liaison provides small to mid-sized businesses with marketing automation capabilities with easy-to-use software, while Direct Mail Marketing creates intelligent promotional mail solutions for businesses.

Direct Mail Manager adds new functionality to Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software® that allows customers to take their marketing efforts offline. With this enhancement, customers can use Lead Liaison to send direct mail pieces to targeted audiences in addition to email and text messages. Marketers can pinpoint a subset of their database based on demographics, behavioral and social characteristics for highly personalized and relevant multi-channel marketing.

This flexibility allows Lead Liaison to join industry giants as a true multi-channel marketing solution for B2C and B2B companies of all sizes and industries.

Regarding the recent partnership, Direct Mail Marketing CTO, Adam White  said, “By partnering with Lead Liaison, we enable businesses to automate and capture more customers with less work. Email has traditionally been the tool of choice for marketing automation. With the extremely targeted direct mail tools we offer being added to the marketing mix, we see customers getting ROI results that exceed email and traditional direct mail programs. In a world of electronic marketing, the tactile experience between company and customer with a postcard is difficult to ignore.”

VP of Customer Success, Alan Page, added, “We’re using this service ourselves – we created a QR code that goes out on postcards to qualified prospects that receive one of our personal demonstrations. The QR code takes the prospect back to one of our landing pages where we’re able to track online activity and alert sales when the prospect takes action. We’re combining direct mail with email and text messaging to showcase our multi-channel capability and give prospective clients a vision for what they can achieve. Our return on follow-ups from these postcards has been stellar thus far. We look forward to helping other companies achieve similar results and are already rolling this out with a home maintenance company. We’re in discussions with a handful of B2B companies that provide high-value solutions and recognize the importance of direct mail as another entry point to build stronger ties with customers and prospects.”

Lead Liaison’s direct mail services are currently in place and ready for subscribing customers to deploy. For more information, please visit the Direct Mail marketing section or see this blog post on direct mail with marketing automation. For an explainer video on an easy-to-use marketing automation platform check out the homepage.

About Postcard Services:

Since 2003 Postcard Services, a direct mailer and software development company, has been dedicated to creating tools that empower businesses of all sizes to create quality direct mail programs, without the expense of hiring multiple agencies.  The company’s retail division serves over 72,000 customers nationwide via its websites:  www.postcardservices.com, www.directmailmanager.com, and www.realtypostcard.com.  The corporate division provides an array of automated private label and other solutions for franchises, contact/call centers, and businesses with repeat direct mail needs.

About Lead Liaison:

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert and close leads. The company markets to small to mid-sized businesses and focuses on providing a user-friendly and innovative Revenue Generation Software® platform. Their software delivers powerful solutions that accelerate sales, improve efficiency and build stronger relationships with prospects, customers and partners through the use of automation.

Press inquiries: Amber Turrill, VP of Corporate Communications

Email: corporate@leadliaison.com

Phone: 888.895.3237

Increase Lead Engagement through Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns

Increase Lead Engagement through Multi-Channel Marketing CampaignsEngaging leads takes time. To get your lead truly engaged and ready to take action, it usually takes a few touches through a few different channels before you gain their trust. Engaging your leads and keeping up with their preferences doesn’t have to be a confusing, timely chore. Having a marketing automation plan in terms of implementing multi-channel marketing campaigns simplifies the process of contacting leads and increasing lead engagement. It also ensures your leads are receiving your messages in the most convenient way possible. In the long run, this means the chances of gaining your leads’ trust increases, which places you closer to closing the sale.

Manage Multi-Channel Marketing Automatically

Using marketing automation to track, score and nurture prospects makes it a walk in the park to understand your leads’ needs. No more manually entering information into your CRM, no more room for human error when in comes to following-up and researching. The brilliant thing about automating your marketing practices is that you can add additional channels and manage all of them in the same place. Text messaging allows for direct and convenient communication and, according to recent polls, most texts are opened by the recipient within minutes. Lead Liaison has just announced the Multi-Channel Marketing capabilities that allow you to engage leads in brand new ways and cover all the bases.

Using SMS

The engagement rates of SMS marketing blow the others out of the water when compared with email marketing and social media posts. The reasons for this jump in recipient activity may be for several different reasons, the first being convenience of reception. Your smartphone is either in your hands, on your desk, in your pocket, or in your purse—never too far from reach. You’ll probably even get an instant notification of the new message with a preview of the text, which is a foot in the door, especially if the message is a discounted offer or deal that you’re offering in exchange for immediate action.

Direct Mail

Despite recent research and polls, SMS isn’t for everybody. That’s why it’s important to utilize multi-channel campaigns and engage your leads when and where they’re ready to receive your messages. On the other end of the spectrum, Lead Liaison has also introduced the direct mail channel. While SMS channels lead in engagement rates, direct mail campaigns are champion when it comes to new customer acquisition (read: multi-channel marketing = success).

At less than $1 per card, you have complete control over what’s sent to your leads. To emphasize all the channels of communication and marketing available, you even have the ability to add a QR code to the card that sends your lead straight to a landing page and right to your next call-to-action. Direct mail plus website visits brings you closer to the goal.

Every lead behaves differently, and that’s where your lead nurturing and tracking practices come in handy. Increasing lead engagement starts with understanding your leads’ needs and how they like to receive their information. The next step—personalizing not only the method of communication, but the message you’re sending as well.

Direct Mail with Marketing Automation

Front of Direct Mail PostcardWe recently added the ability to send direct mail with marketing automation using Lead Liaison. We’re genuinely excited about this new marketing channel that our customer base can take advantage of. Designing our first direct mail campaign was easy. In this post we’ll talk about how simple it was to put together a direct mail campaign using Lead Liaison’s marketing automation software.

Background on Direct Mail

B2B marketing typically requires 5 to 7 touches before a prospect buys from a provider. Why? They want to build trust, build the relationship and know you’re not a fly-by-night vendor blasting out communications hoping you’ll respond to the first thing they see. Using all of those 5 to 7 touches on phone calls or emails could get old, really fast. Enter direct mail.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, typical response rates are 4.4% for direct mail (overall)

While response rates are high, so are conversions for new customers.

The CMO Council reports direct mail has the highest rate of success in new customer acquisition at 34% compared with other marketing channels.

It’s time we start thinking about integrating direct mail with marketing automation.

How We Did It

Back of Direct Mail Campaign

Adding direct mail to our marketing automation campaign was easy. Here are the steps we took to launch our campaign.

  1. Created a template in Photoshop. This took us about an hour to do. Alternatively, you could use pre-made templates from our partner, Direct Mail Manager. They’ve got 100s of pre-made cards to choose from.
  2. We put a QR code on the back of the postcard that linked to a landing page we built in Lead Liaison. When the recipient gets the card they scan it with their smart phone which loads the landing page along with an attractive offer.
  3. We deposited $1.04 into our account at Direct Mail Manager. Yes, only about a buck! Each card cost $.52 and we sent one to our Product Manager and one to an Account Manager. You can deposit as little as $.52 into your Direct Mail Manager Account.
  4. We created a Webhook in Lead Liaison.
  5. We added the Webhook as an action in our marketing campaign workflow.
  6. Boom! Within three (3) days the postcard showed up in the mail.

Let us help you get your direct mail campaign off the ground!