Direct mail has been a valuable source of customer awareness and engagement for decades.

Whether you are an auto dealer seeking to promote a sales event or an up-and-coming bakery creating designer wedding cakes, direct mail is still the go-to channel for reaching your market.

With that said, marketing has undergone a significant shift in the last fifteen years with the rise of social media, pay-per-click advertising and email marketing.

In 2017 digital advertising surpassed television advertising and made up 57% of all ad spend.

This shows the relevance of digital marketing in today’s mobile world.

Just like the Dude, Moore’s Law abides.

While it may seem impossible to keep up with the digital revolution, digital also isn’t the only channel around:

Direct mail still matters. And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

The way forward is omni-channel: merging the power of direct and digital marketing to get the most out of each.

With omni-channel marketing, you can benefit from advanced targeting on digital ads while using the same strategy as direct mail.

So how do you make the most out of digital and direct?

With advanced platforms like Facebook, we can import mailing lists directly into their advertiser interface, enabling their algorithms to match users based on their physical addresses and other demographic information.

This allows us to expand your offer’s audience while tailoring ads specifically to those most willing to engage with your content.

Additionally, through the data gathered by embedding short code into the back-end of these ads, our direct mail clients can better develop their targeting information for the future.

A key principle we follow when creating online campaigns is to ensure a trustworthy message and incentive so that the consumers are more likely to submit their information.

By building this rapport, we enable Facebook to collect valuable information about your target audiences – the more leads captured, the more the platform understands about your campaign.

This is ideal since they study the demographics and buying behaviors to ensure that your ad is being served optimally.

We are also able to split test (A/B test) your campaigns to test specific variables and potentially increase the conversion rate of your ads.

Landing pages are single pages used to grab consumers attention and lead them to submit information, such as an email address or phone number, usually in exchange for an offer.

Just like direct mail, the messages in landing pages are simple and straightforward.

Good pages have an attractive design, engaging headlines, a list of value propositions, and a clear CTA (call to action).

This is all very similar to the format of a good direct mail piece.

So why is this information so critical?

Imagine yourself as a local auto dealer:

A direct mail campaign is a great approach to generate awareness for a specific event within a certain geographic area.

But a landing page tied to a pay per click campaign can do even more:

It can capture real contact information from interested people, generating highly qualified leads for the sales team at the dealership.

This is just one of many examples of an effective landing page:

The largest benefit of these landing pages is that they are optimized to lead viewers to take action.

Once the consumer takes action and submits contact information, they are that much more likely to follow through on their purchase decision.

The power of landing pages and the ability to track and measure the response is incredible!

With this power, you can not only sell more products and services, but you can also directly prove which marketing efforts those sales came from.

Email marketing is a highly effective way to target those who have submitted their contact information via digital marketing campaigns.

As with the earlier example of the auto dealer, anyone can benefit from these techniques.

Much like a landing page, an email campaign works best when matched to the original direct mail’s creative and offer.

In practice, we use these emails to generate personalized content sent directly to leads.

By customizing the message and offer, email increases conversion rates and engagement.

A further benefit to your clients is that they can use these leads and re-target them for future offers that are relevant to those consumers.

This enables sales teams to nurture cold leads into hot leads when the customer is caught in the sales funnel.

This is an incredible advantage for organizations utilizing direct mail with digital add-ons:

With it, they are able to expand the life of these campaigns and maintain a dialogue with their customers.

Email is about delivering on promises.

–Gary Vaynerchuk

While direct mail may be your organization’s bread and butter, adopting these new technologies is an incredibly cost-effective and efficient way of delivering the most value to your clients.

When pairing these two mediums, you become a powerhouse for your clients.

As marketers, we all want to provide our clients with solutions of extraordinary value.

Digital add-ons are turnkey solutions to increase the reach and conversion rates for your clients.

Rocky had Mickey Goldmill, Warren Buffet has Charlie Munger, now Direct Mail has DME Digital.

You may be asking yourself, “How do I develop a digital team?”

Guess what, you don’t have too!

DME Digital has a resource guide to keep you up to date with all the industry’s best practices so you can be successful.

To get an idea of how cost effective these add-ons are, check out the services we provide to our DME Digital partners.