Finding Your Business Pain Points with Direct Mail

Pain points. A phrase many business owners, stakeholders, and project managers know and dread. As businesses grow and invest more time and capital into their marketing budgets, friction and waste often develop.

Rather than focusing on campaign performance, discussions soon turn to identifying and eliminating these issues.

All forms of marketing inherently include pain points. Fortunately, direct mail makes them easier to identify and remedy so you can focus on growing your business – instead of constantly putting out fires.

While digital marketing involves a variety of key metrics, such as response rates and link clicks, there is still information lost in the process. Not only is some data absent or skewed, but constantly changing online algorithms could mean that a once successful ad campaign suddenly plummets despite no apparent change in the market. 

Anyone in marketing will tell you that you cannot change more than one variable at a time when comparing campaign results – because doing so makes it impossible to attribute any change in performance.  

For example – let’s say you adjust to your budget on a pay-per-click campaign. After a week, you don’t see any increase in response rates despite spending more money. 

What happened? Did you overspend and reach a point of diminishing returns? Has a competitor outbid you? Was there a change in Google’s ad ranking guidelines? Did their algorithm decide to serve your ads to different audiences?

Fortunately, direct mail avoids these mysteries inherent to online marketing platforms. By identifying relevant prospects based on households, this channel allows marketers to view accurate data and success rates for each campaign without any additional variables to consider.

From this consistent data, business owners and marketers can learn which campaigns receive results without worrying about algorithms or other bidders. Since there is no algorithm – mail delivers – and the results come in, period. 

But like everything else, there will always be pain points… The difference is direct mail makes these issues easier to identify, address, and move on to something new. 

Related: How Internet Users Block Digital Advertising

Pain Points Based on Location

Because direct mail ties to a particular address, tracking nationwide campaigns is quite simple. The unique address of each responsive lead lets companies identify the success rates of their marketing efforts by state or region. 

Using this identifier is a great way to not only track campaign progress, but also find patterns between locations. 

There’s no IP address or other geofencing issue with mail – where you mail is where you mail. If an area consistently underperforms, you can either use different messaging – or simply not mail there again.

Related: Direct Mail and Homeowners: The Hidden Audience

Pain Points in Campaign Quality

Determining the the success of a campaign is done by studying both the quantity and quality of leads it produces. The more quality leads a campaign brings in, the more sales a company can make. 

With a digital campaign – it is unclear if you are reaching the right leads every time.

Because account information is typically user-generated, errors or intentionally misleading information can wreck even the best campaigns. If your online marketing underperforms, you cannot know if the reason is a poor campaign model or because of inaccurate account data skewing which users are viewing your ads. 

A response from a direct mail campaign is far more reliable in this instance. Household data is harder to fake, so you can be sure that every response is from a real person that has an interest in your product. Furthermore, if you receive a large quantity of irrelevant leads, you can determine that the mailer itself is flawed, and not the user-targeting. 

Pain Points in Marketing Touchpoints

Any marketer will tell you, every campaign must include several forms of customer touchpoints to increase the likelihood of success.

By having your customers interact with your ads in different mediums several times along the buyer journey, they are more likely to remember you in their time of need. 

Digital ads do not have the luxury of multiple touchpoints within one ad campaign. It is unlikely that customers will remember your digital ad after their brief internet session. More campaign spending is required to re-target these users – which costs a company more time and money.

Furthermore, the ephemeral nature of digital advertising is such that once a campaign ends, you instantly stop receiving leads. Companies must keep spending (and monitoring) to keep the action coming. 

Direct mail is not like this at all. Since direct mail has one of the longest advertising lifespans, an older campaign could still receive leads months – sometimes even years later. This means that direct mail campaigns always get more beneficial over time – once we do a campaign, as more responses come in, it becomes more profitable. A campaign is always least profitable the day it goes outbound, and never stops getting more profitable until the last lead is received.

Additionally, one mailer over time has several marketing touchpoints within the home. Since mail is passed around the home 1.2 times on average, your campaign is more likely to make a sale with no additional costs to you. 

Related: Direct Mail: Multiple Marketing Touchpoints

Pain Points Due to Timing/Seasonality

Every company experiences the occasional low sales period as economic cycles come and go. Sometimes these lows are due to seasonal changes, while others are due to unexpected circumstances within the country or economy.

Whether these sales periods are known or a surprise, it is how a company adjusts to these changes that determines its overall success. 

Political or economic uncertainty, a recession, or even a change in weather can affect the bottom line. Knowing the possible outcome of an event or seasonal occurrence can help a business make calculated decisions based on previous performance. 

Direct mail makes the calendar cycle very easy to predict. The same campaigns are likely to perform with the same level of success year after year. This data can then be used to track monthly variables throughout a selected period to predict future results.

With digital campaigns, you are never certain if your campaign under-performed due to seasonal fluctuations, if something changed in the algorithm, or if a competitor increased their marketing– you risk getting false seasonal signals.

When Google adjusts its guidelines for SEO, months – even years – of hard work can get wrecked overnight. And which email marketer could have predicted the effects of Outlook’s focused inbox or Google’s “Promotions” tab ahead of time?