Table of Contents
Direct marketing caters to a specific and highly targeted audience. The more personalised your message, the better it will resonate with your subscribers. This is why direct mail is a great channel for programmatic advertising.
Direct marketing can be programmatic in four ways: targeting, personalisation, automation, and measuring campaign performance. In this article, we will explore all these factors and how they interact with one another. We’ll also provide suggestions on how you can target your most likely prospects via direct mail in order to increase campaign performance.
Targeting
Direct mail is a highly targeted channel. In fact, your campaign’s success will be directly proportional to how well you can segment and target your audience. To measure the effectiveness of your targeting effort, you can access pre-built audience segments on most mailing platforms. For example, you can create a custom audience segment around gender, location, and interests.
You can also segment based on past purchase behaviour and demographics to maximise campaign performance. You can also add custom segments based on the recipient’s demographics as well as their engagement with your email campaigns. If some of your subscribers have shown a positive response to your emails, you can create a custom segment based on their actions. You can also set up a segment that targets all subscribers who have a high likelihood of becoming brand advocates.
Personalisation
Once you’ve segmented your audience, the next step is to personalise your messages. You can personalise your campaign’s subject, body copy, and images. You can also create different versions of your campaign’s messages for different segments. This will allow you to cater to your different audiences with different messaging styles.
When personalising your copy, you’ll want to consider what your audience members are likely to want to hear about. You’ll also want to consider any sensitive topics that your audience may be interested in learning more about. For example, if you’re offering a health product, you may want to cover topics like birth control or healthy eating habits. If you’re selling financial products such as insurance or investments, you may want to cover topics such as retirement or financial planning.
Automation
Customising your campaign’s copy, imagery, and timing are great ways to personalise your messages. You can also use automation to maximise campaign performance at each stage of your direct mail process. At the pre-production stage of your campaign, you can use automation to create your mailing templates. You can use these templates to create your direct mail campaign, in addition to template changes.
For example, if you use a specific delivery method or time of day, you can automate these changes to your templates. This will ensure that your campaigns are consistently delivered. Post-production automation refers to the stage in which you set up your mailing system to automatically produce and print your documents. At this stage, you can also set up your mailing system to include tracking metrics to measure the performance of your campaign.
Reporting and Measurement
At the end of the day, direct mail campaigns are all about measurement. You want to be able to track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and return on investment to optimise your campaign. First, you can set up your tracking system to track the actions that your subscribers perform as they receive your direct mail campaign. You can track their actions as they read and open your emails, click on your links, click unsubscribe links, and take any other actions that they perform while they’re reading your campaign.
You can also set up your tracking system to track the metrics that are most important to your campaign’s success. For example, you can track the number of subscribers who open your email or click on your links. You can also track breakdowns such as the number of emails that subscribers open, the number of emails that are read, the number of links that subscribers click, and the number of emails that subscribers then unsubscribe from.
Summing up
Direct marketing is an effective channel for programmatic advertising. You can use custom audience segments, targeting, personalisation, automation, and measurement to attract the right audience to your message.
When you have a successful campaign, measure the performance of your channels by tracking open rates, click-through rates, and return on investment. With this information, you can optimise your campaign to yield even better results. Now that you’re familiar with the basics of direct mail, it’s time to dive into programmatic direct mail advertising in-depth. Before you do, though, make sure to review these 6 essential tips for programmatic direct mail advertising.
