It has been proven that most consumers shop, eat out, and visit places that are close to home. Typically, the furthest they will travel is a 20-minute drive depending on their destination. This means if your business is only 5 minutes away from your audience and your competitor is 30 minutes away, chances are extremely high that your audience will visit you instead of your competitor. But first you need to reach out to them.

So, how do you market to an audience by how many minutes they live away from your location? The answer is with Drive Time Mailing and we’ve got everything you need to know, including how it works and how it’s different from radius mailing.

What is Drive Time Mailing?

Drive time mailing—also known as “Drive Time Mapping” or “Drive Time Marketing”—is a marketing strategy that pairs with Propensity Mailing and utilizes drive time analysis where you can choose a certain distance away from your business's location and reach interested individuals who live within that time limit away. For example, you could reach people who live within a 5-minute or 10-minute drive time away from your location.

How is Drive Time Mailing different from Radius, or Proximity Mailing?

Proximity Mailing, or Radius mailing creates a perfect circle around your location that is created by an X number of miles. With Proximity Mailing, you simply choose a radius, for example, 10 miles around your location or starting point, then choose how many people you would like to reach and filter them by certain demographics. It does not account for road systems or highway networks. This means one person on one side of your radius may live 40 minutes away while another on the equal, opposite side may live 10 minutes away from your location.

Drive Time Mailing, however, does not create a perfect circle. It follows road networks and takes account of urban and rural areas along with traffic lights, speed limits, physical obstacles, etc. This allows you to target an audience who lives as little as a few minutes to a couple of hours away from your location.

How Does Drive Time Mailing Work?

Drive Time Mailing works alongside Propensity Mailing or Intent-Driven Direct Mailing. This way you can not only target an audience that is a close drive away, but you can also reach an audience who is most likely interested in what your company has to offer.

For example, if you own a winery, you could target individuals who show interest in wine, are of a certain age and gender, but who also live only 10 minutes away from your winery.

Essentially, how Drive Time Mailing works, is you choose your company’s targeted audience who is most likely interested in your business based on interests, demographics, buying activity, and more. Then you choose an appropriate driving distance away from your business’s location and the Drive Time Mapping tool will filter your audience within that driving parameter. For example, if you are looking to promote the new exhibit at your museum, you could choose a 15-minute driving distance, and then reach individuals based on age, gender, etc. and who show interest in arts and culture.

What are The Benefits of Drive Time Mailing?

Drive Time Mailing is especially beneficial when you are looking to target a specific audience who is most likely interested in what your business has to offer, but your location could persuade them to visit you even more. This is a critical marketing strategy when you have a business where consumers need to visit you. For example, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, retail stores, wineries, breweries, parks, museums, and more.

Distance is always an important factor when you have a product or service that involves your audience visiting you. This is because people tend to be more interested when something is close to them. If they have to drive 30 minutes to an hour to get to your brewery, they are less likely to visit you. If they live 5 to 15 minutes away, they are much more likely to drive that short distance.

Think about it, say you received a postcard from a movie theater that just opened up, but it is a 35-minute drive away from your house, and you have a movie theater that is only a 10-minute drive. Now, you may be intrigued that it is brand new, and they are offering a free soda or something, but chances are you would prefer to save some gas money and enjoy a movie at your local theater.

The same goes for your audience as well. And even if they visit you once to take you up on your offer, repeat business is a far stretch.

Now you may be thinking, if I am only a 5- or 10-minute drive away, these people must already know about my business. However, there are many factors that make this untrue. For example, if they travel in the opposite direction frequently, they may not be aware of your location. On top of that, perhaps they have heard about your business, but brand recall hasn’t developed. No matter what the reason is, reaching out and letting your nearby audience know you’re open and have what they are interested in will increase your brand awareness and bring more customers in every time.

If you are interested in taking advantage of Drive Time Mailing to drive nearby future customers to your business, click below to learn more. Our Intent-Driven Direct Mail solution has the capability to target the right audience for your marketing campaign along with filtering your audience based on accurate drive time distances.