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Direct Mail - Old dog- New tricks?

info@lockstockprint.com (chris Jones) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 17:10:18 GMT

Direct Mail marketing: an old-school solution that’s adapted to today’s marketing challenges.

Be it whipping customer data into shape, producing and distributing printed material, or providing strategic support to decision makers, for more than two decades Lock Stock has built an impressive reputation working in the background with niche publishers, big brands, and independent furniture retailers to get their printed messaging to the right people, at the right time and in the right way.

“One of the secrets to our long success in a competitive market has been staying compact, agile and responsive,” explains founder Christopher Jones. “Thinking small on overheads and big on service dexterity has enabled us to be much more adaptable to not only our customers’ changing needs, but also the changing consumer journey.”

This is important because the function of print and direct mail as a standalone channel has changed over the past 20 years. In a digitally disrupted landscape, marketing departments are increasingly faced with competing channel choices with which to capture customers’ attention, while also keeping budgets under control. “In a digital environment print needs to work harder to compete and we help in doing just that,” Chris explains.

When analysing the data, it’s hard to question that assertion. According to the Royal Mail’s 2021 market reach report, Driving Effectiveness with Direct Mail, only 3.6 per cent of all media spend in 2021 was on direct mail, with 70 per cent focusing on online activities. Television came in as the second largest spending area, at 15 per cent.

At first glance these figures don’t look very good for traditional direct mail, especially when factoring investment considerations. But when you look deeper into the actual performance metrics of direct mail, it is surprising how effective receiving something through your letterbox still is.

For example, according to another Royal Mail report (A Practical Guide to Direct Mail, 2021), almost 70 per cent of people say that actual mail, rather than email, makes them feel valued. Indeed, nearly all advertising mail – 94 per cent – is opened. That’s an exceptional figure compared with email open rates of a mere 21 per cent. Research conducted last year by JICMAIL also suggests more than 70 per cent of people have been successfully directed towards online activity purely by printed direct mail they have received.

This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, direct mail is proving to be an excellent way of boosting digital engagement. Secondly, considering the share of marketing spend allocated to online activities, it’s clear that this old-school solution is becoming a differentiator in evolving digital marketing strategies.

According to research in this area, the current environment presents an opportunity for marketers to reappraise direct mail beyond it’s proven track record of boosting sales and footfall. It’s worth delving deeper into how direct mail can also improve brand awareness, consideration, and digital engagement – all soft metrics vital to modern retailers.

“Production is largely commoditised,” says Chris. “It’s our ability to carefully blend the powerful mix of customer journey insight, data profiling and production know-how that makes the difference when collaborating with brands over printed direct mail campaigns. This approach delivers bankable results for our customers and ultimately engaging experiences for their prospective customers.”

With all that in mind, here are a couple of quick tips from Chris to help improve your return on your next printed direct mail campaign:

Sell product not paper

Paper will account for around 60 per cent of your overall print costs, and weight impacts on distribution costs in turn, so making the right selection in this area can be vital, especially when considering the rising costs. Response rates are primarily driven by targeting and the strength of the offer. The only person that will really notice the difference between a 100gsm arctic gloss paper or a 90gsm nova silk will likely be your finance director. So don’t just rebuy the “same as last time” – always re-evaluate the relationship between your materials, weight, and distribution method.

Don’t forget to signpost

You have paid handsomely to get that marketing message into the right hands, so never miss the opportunity to signpost additional channel engagement. Print is an excellent journey influencer so the inclusion of online discount codes, social media news or scannable QR codes within your creative can, over time, go a long way to pushing up your likes, followers, and page views, ultimately increasing your reach and deepening engagement. And the best thing is, none of this impacts on print or distribution costs.

We don’t just love personalisation. We demand it.

info@lockstockprint.com (chris Jones) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 17:10:18 GMT

GETTING PERSONAL.

Personalised marketing isn’t new. It’s been around as a theory since the turn of the millennium, but the practicalities of delivering it have been much slower to develop.

Today, we find ourselves with the data mining techniques, printing technology and design nous to create a myriad of targeted, engaging and in some instances slightly creepy marketing materials. So how do you get started?

According the McKinsey Personalisation matters more than ever, with COVID-19 and the surge in digital behaviours raising the bar. With a sizable percentage of consumers switched to a new store, product, or buying method during the pandemic, with over seventy percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. This suggests, personalisation is driving performance and better customer outcomes, with fast growing companies generating 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.

What’s in a name?

The most recognisable campaign that put personalisation to the map has to be ‘Share a Coke’ from Coca Cola, which saw frenzied buyers nose diving into palettes of coke hoping to find one with their name on it. Of course, this goes a whole lot further than sending personalised mail, encouraging customers to find their own name in the sea of Johns, Jacks and Joes, and even encouraging them to fork out hard earned money to have their less conventional name emblazoned on a bottle of tooth-rotting carbonated pop.

Whilst it may not have ticked all the boxes for your stereotypical personalised marketing campaign, it did highlight just how much we like things to be personalised; to feel like part of an exciting and bigger picture. After all, Nutella, Marmite and a whole host of other brands quickly followed suit and offered a similar personalised labelling experience to their customers too.

So, aside from the popularity of targeting marketing and Coca Cola showing the world how to do personalisation on a mass scale, what do more modest marketers need to know about personalising their marketing efforts?

Simple can be very effective.

There is nothing more impactful than seeing your own name and information on direct mail, in fact customers demand it. The inclusion of customer’s name, on a letter, or on each tear out voucher, are great starting points for a company just starting out with personalised print marketing. Why is simple good? Because simple isn’t creepy – remember the golden rule about not wanting a stalker?

By special invitation.

Sending a personalised invitation to “invite only” preview sales events has been used to great effect in industries such as furniture retail and automotive to dive footfall for years, it is also an excellent way to reconnect with lapsed customers sitting on your data lists. Combing this with a digital channel response, such as registering your attendance on your site, and this can also be seamless jump-in point to your digital environment, which will enable you to revitalise your customer data, and measure response metrics more acutely. More about the role of printed direct mail in driving digital engagement is in an article I wrote for the independent online.

Data is the key.

Print technology is now well established and can create amazing ways to get personal. BUT, if you don’t have your data assets, lean, clean, and compliant the process is pointless, or even worse, damaging. For example: sending an invitation to a deceased householder, and a family member received it will likely cause nothing but upset and anger. It is also important to know that GDPR regulations demands your date is clean, accurate and have the appropriate consents. If you don’t know much about this, you should check out our [recent post] on the topic.

In a nutshell, the best way of ensuring your targeted mailers is, well, targeted, is investment in your data hygiene. Sure, this will create an often-overlooked cost, but when you consider the costs involved in producing and distributing direct mail, reductions in wastage through streamlining unusable, inaccurate, or outdated data is a no-brainer investment.

Bottom-line - Getting your data right is the most important step toward personalised messaging.

CREATE EMOTION, GENERATE RETURN

info@lockstockprint.com (chris Jones) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:15:40 GMT

Why direct mail gets us “totes emosh” in a digital world.

What’s the difference between a good film and an Oscar winner? One word – emotion. It can be said for lots of things; books, your favourite soap opera, a wedding, a letter in the post. These things are all better and more memorable if they evoke an emotional response.

When it comes to advertising and brand engagement, toying with our feelings is nothing new. From charities tugging at your heart strings, Christmas ads that make you feel all warm and fuzzy – it’s safe to say that emotions and advertising have been in the midst of a love affair for decades.

But what emotion is the right emotion?

It’s widely accepted in the marketing industry that evoking high arousal emotions like awe and anger get the best response. This means making your audience shake their firsts with rage or admire your brand so much they simply have to share it, will make them act – and fast.

On the flip side, low arousal emotions like sadness and contentment provoke the least response. Let’s be honest, above and beyond a mushy overshare on Facebook, no one ever sprang into action over their feelings of content. We’ll come back to the idea of getting your audience to feel a certain emotion later.

What about printed advertising mail?

Good news, the idea of generating emotions to improve the success of marketing can confidently be applied to strategic print advertising too – in fact, according to Royal Mail research, when it comes to valued mail, 92% of recipients say they feel a positive emotion. But before you come over all Steven Spielberg with your artwork brief, there are a few things you need to get your head around.

We’re dealing with the subconscious here.

Research shows that humans are instinctive creatures and no matter how digitised we become as a society, that inherent need to react to certain stimuli is still buried within us. This is an important consideration when it comes to advertising on the doormat.

Strangely enough, investigations conducted by Royal Mail discovered that mail’s effectiveness appears to be based partly on deep, subconscious, physical instincts rather than learned cultural responses. Which means we can expect that people are not directly and consciously aware of the full impact that mail is having on them. In their study, nine out of 12 participating households claimed that all mail was ignored, yet all 12 were observed interacting with mail at length.

This subconscious activity was confirmed in the study’s quantitative follow-up, where 62% of people claimed to reject all advertising mail outright, yet when asked what they had actually done with the mail, 64% had opened a piece of mail and most them went on to interact with it.

Their research found that when asked to talk unprompted about the mail they received, there were two key improvements when discussing the more unusual type mail:

Participants used a wider range of words to talk about the items and were more animated and creative in the way they described them.
The words used were more emotional and less functional - they focussed on the qualities of the piece and the sensations it evoked about the brand, rather than the exact nature of the offer.

The endowment effect

One of the reasons receiving and reacting to direct mail is such a subconscious activity is the act of physical touch. The term ‘Endowment Effect’ describes a sense of ownership over something when we see and touch it, compared to only seeing it.

In other words, bring physical touch into the marketing mix (in the form of high-quality direct mail through their door) and your customers are 24% more likely to engage with it than if it were displayed in a medium they could only see, like a TV or email.

Generating an emotional response with mail

Ok, so we’ve convinced you on the virtues of provoking an emotional response with your direct advertising mail and now you want to know how to do it? So how do you make your customers gasp with awe, grin with delight or as the millennials call it, “get totes emosh”? The answer probably isn’t as glamourous as you might hope – there won’t be any Oscar-winning performances here.

All you need is strategy (and a decent helping of creative flair of course!)

Research tells us that when it comes to ‘useful mail’ the most positive emotional responses are:

Feeling better informed – on products and services which solve a problem you face (66%)
Feeling understood – by a brand which knows your interests, your lifestyle and your preferences (48%)
Feeling tempted – By new services and products which are affordable but aspirational

Ok, so they aren’t the most memorable emotional responses, right? But they certainly are powerful – in fact, 92% of people who feel one of these emotions when interacting with mail will take action, either acting, advocating, researching or planning around your brand, products or services.

How does print strategy help you evoke these emotions?

Well, a solid print strategy will transform the data you have captured about your customers into direct mail campaigns that are tailored to your audience. Helping you to create tactile mail which informs, empathises, relates to and tempts your customers – creating emotion and generating return.

If you want to learn more about print strategy and how to get your customers feeling all the right feelings, connect with me [Here] .