The key benefit of direct mail: It is a very accurate type of advertising at your disposal because it precisely reaches the types of potential customers your company offers the greatest value.
Suppose you have ten acres of land, one acre of garden, and a limited supply of water. Are you going to water all your land evenly and hope something good comes of it? Or are you exclusively going to water your garden, because you have a knack for avoiding senseless waste?
A roofer can easily send direct mail to every owner of a house built before the year 2000 within a certain neighborhood. A landscaper can make sure only to send direct mail to owners of houses worth $500,000 or more. A Midwestern realtor might send direct mail to everyone who purchased their current home before 1975, reasoning that they’re now growing older and beginning to realize the appeal of beachside condos in Florida. There is virtually zero limit to the precision of direct mail.
And the benefits of direct mail do not end there.
Direct Mail Is Personalized
If you have ever received an email that begins with “Hello Friend,” then you already know how long it holds your attention. But direct mail is far more effective than such a blanket approach simply because it’s addressed to its recipient.
People automatically snap to attention when they hear their own names – psychologists have proven it literally affects their brains – and that brief moment is all your advertisement needs to make a full, lasting impression. Add in a little extra personalized information, and a piece of direct mail becomes all the more effective. It’s little wonder why two-thirds of people believe that mail is more important than the internet in this so-called “Digital Age.”
Direct Mail Is Tangible
Another reason why direct mail trumps email is tangibility. In short, people assign greater value to anything they can touch. Whereas an email is no more than a fleeting glimpse of data scrawled across a digital screen, a piece of direct mail exists. It has weight and texture, and its recipient is going to reason (at least subconsciously) that it’s worth their attention because they’re holding it and someone paid money to send it to them.
Direct Mail Conveys More Details
This is an added benefit of tangibility. When the average person is exposed to 10,000 ads every single day, it’s only natural that they’re going to ignore most if not all of them. Even if it succeeds at attracting attention, an online ad has almost no space to convey the advertiser’s full offer. But if a person spends the effort to pick up an ad, they’re forced to pay at least some attention to it – even if they’re only carrying it to the recycling bin.
So long as its recipient pays enough attention to it to throw it away, a piece of direct mail will have enough time to convey all the details about the advertiser’s promoted event, deal or product. We’ve heard many stories of people who decided to engage with a business at some point in between taking their ad out of their mailbox and carrying it to their trash bin!
Direct Mail Is Customizable
Sometimes an advertiser only needs a colorful postcard to deliver their message. “We Install Awnings” with a picture of a smiling family standing in front of their nice, new awnings is often all it takes to compel people to buy new awnings. Other times a piece of direct mail is more effective if it is larger, as in the case of a real estate brokerage which wants to show off all the listings they’ve recently sold in a certain neighborhood. Whether your message would best be conveyed with a postcard, leaflet, catalogue or magazine, you don’t have to accept any space limitations when you’re utilizing direct mail.
Direct Mail Gets Results
According to the Data & Marketing Association, the average rate of response to advertising emails is 0.12%. In other words, only one in 833 emails gets any sort of reaction. The response rate for direct mail, on the other hand, is a whopping 4.4% – one out of 22 recipients will reach out to the advertiser!
Email advertising campaigns can be much cheaper, of course, but direct mail’s incomparably greater response rate spells a huge return on investment. And because direct mail can include a special code for the customer to redeem when they contact the advertiser, it’s easy to measure a direct mail campaign’s success rate with pinpoint precision.
Direct Mail Is Cost-Effective
This isn’t to say that direct mail is cheap. You have to pay for the contact mailing list, the design process, the raw materials and the postage, and that can add up to thousands of dollars depending on the scope of your advertising campaign. But the leads and actual connections you’ll make with first-time customers will almost certainly recoup your upfront expenses and then some.
It all boils down to this: Despite the popular opinion that everything relevant is digital these days, old-fashioned direct mail remains extremely popular for the simple fact that it works. And we would like to show you exactly how much direct mail can do for your business. Please contact us today to learn more about how Arvig Media can make Direct Mail work for you.