News
 Extend
Your Reach with Mail
By Greg Whiteman, manager for market research, USPS®
With consumer spending sliding and the economy in a
downturn, marketers are more pressed than ever to
build relationships with target audiences. They must
develop a bond that goes beyond a single sale and
into long-term engagement with the brand. This type
of interaction isn’t a marketing luxury, either.
Engagement is quickly becoming one of the most
important and hotly contested industry battlegrounds
of 2009. And no channel can engage as potently as
direct mail.
Consider that most businesses grow by acquiring new
customers or increasing the spending of existing
customers. When you create a relationship with a
consumer, you increase the likelihood that you will
either win that customer’s loyalty or increase their
share of wallet.
To this end, mail remains an ideal medium. It is a
fundamental, familiar, easy and safe communications
pipeline into homes. Moreover, mail stimulates
multiple senses at once. And unlike typical Internet
marketing — where the consumer has to initiate
contact with the company — mail brings your brand to
the consumer. In fact, one USPS study shows that 98%
of consumers bring their mail in each day, and that
77% of customers sort through and organize the mail
immediately.
When consumers receive mail, they know they are in
complete control of the relationship. They can open
the envelope, remove the contents and decide whether
or not to keep them. They know it’s a secure,
private message, which helps them be open to an
ongoing dialogue. There are none of the privacy
concerns that in digital marketing frustrate the
connection the company is trying to forge.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that the digital realm
can’t strengthen engagement.
But mail can target in a way digital just can’t
match. In the home, one person is typically
responsible for handling the mail. Known in our
circles as the CEO of the Mail, this person is also
the household’s bill payer and principal shopper in
85% of homes. That’s the person most marketers want
to reach. There’s no similar connection between a
computer user and the manager of home life. E-mail
messages may get to the right home, but not the
right person.
By the right person, I mean the influencer in the
home. For instance, our research shows that, in
three-fourths of American households, women are CEOs
of the Mail. In these households, women are also
overwhelmingly responsible for responding to
marketing offers: 95% determine which ad materials
to keep; 93% clip coupons; and 86% write the checks.
So not only can mail engage, but it’s much more
likely to engage the person most responsible for
purchase choices.
Some marketers feel mail is not as effective at
brand building as it is at generating response. But
mail can be just as effective at building a
relationship with a brand.
For instance, large retailers have always used mail
to retain and strengthen relationships with existing
customers. While some store mailers, like coupons or
special promotion notices, aim to get customers in
the store, other pieces communicate changes in the
relationship with existing customers, such as
upcoming merchandise or special events. The
retailers differentiate themselves by building a
deeper relationship with their consumers, resulting
in a definite advantage in the marketplace. Mail can
engage customers like no other medium because
consumers already trust it and are open to receiving
it in a way that makes building marketing routines
and relationships around it very easy.
---Source:
Deliver® Magazine April 17, 2009 (www.delivermagazine.com).
Deliver is a U.S. Postal Service publication.
|
|
|
Melissa Data
|
 |
| Enhance your
website, software or database with
easy-to-integrate data quality programming tools
and web services. |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Save money on postage using leading
mail preparation software and other
direct marketing products. |
|
|
|
|
 |
Update & standardize addresses and
find out more about contacts in your
database.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Find new customers perfect for your
business with our online and
specialty mailing lists.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Locate the business information you
need such as ZIP Codes, address
verification, maps.
|
|
|
|
|
Facebook
Twitter
