Often times marketers’ sales funnel and life cycle marketing involve email and other online marketing efforts to send timely and personalized messages that hopefully get a prospect from being attracted to your product to buying your product.

However, there is a more effective way that is proven to generate better results.

Reaching out to a prospect and sending them a direct mail piece at every stage in the customer journey with your brand is far more effective than sending them just another email on top of the 100 they already received from other brands that day.

Here are some ways you can incorporate direct mail into your marketing funnel to gain better results starting today.

Stage 1: Attract & Build Brand Awareness

Getting potential customers' attention and sharing with them your brand’s value is the first stage of any marketing funnel.

With direct mail, there are several ways you can achieve this in a way that builds stronger brand awareness from the very beginning.

Reach Your Ideal Customers with Direct Mail

At the top of your marketing funnel, you need to implement marketing efforts that reach the kind of audience you have identified to be your ideal clients to attract and increase traffic.

This can be done in multiple ways using direct mail, including using a targeted mailing list to reach an audience based on certain demographics and locations.

Here are two ways you can reach your ideal audience through direct mail:

Not sure who your ideal customers are: Identify them and create a mailing list of potential, unknown customers who are just like your current customers using Look-Alike Mailing.

Know who your ideal customers are: Create a mailing list of potential customers who are interested in what your company has to offer by taking advantage of Propensity Mailing. This direct mail solution uses data to analyze consumers' behaviors, buying activity, attitudes, and more to create a list of interested individuals.

Attract Certain Locations

For many businesses, location is everything. No one is going to visit your winery if it’s 4 hours away.

On the other hand, even for e-commerce companies, saturating an area with your brand has proved to be effective and very cost-friendly at getting your leads to begin the buyer’s journey.

So, no matter what industry you’re in, consider building brand awareness by reaching certain locations with these direct mail strategies:

Every Door Direct Mail: Choose a Zip code or mailing route and send a direct mailer to every household on your chosen route.

Proximity Mailing: Reach individuals who surround your ideal customer, or customers, to build brand awareness and to let your customer’s neighbors know you can help them too.

Drive Time Mailing: Target consumers who are interested in what your company has to offer and who live only a short drive away.

Note: Make sure to include a unique URL, call tracking number or QR code on your direct mailer, no matter what strategy you choose, so you can easily track who may be the most interested and begin collecting more personalized data.

Stage 2: Inform & Create Interest

You can’t just reach out once and expect a prospect to become a loyal customer. With any form of marketing, the first email, the first social media ad, the first postcard, you will always get the worst results.

The second outreach message you will get the 2nd best results and the 3rd (which we will go into more details soon) will generate the best results.

Your second direct mail message needs to inform your prospects that your company can fulfill their wants and needs to give them an extra push to make their final decision.

Here are a couple of ways you can do this successfully with direct mail:

Choose the most affordable strategy: Although direct mail is the #1 most cost-effective marketing strategy, it can become expensive to reach out to your audience multiple times. So, choose a 6x9 postcard design and Postcard Commingling so you can send as few or as many messages with only a few cents per postcard and with bulk mailing rates included.

This direct mail service allows you to affordably follow up with potential customers as you need to and as they enter the second stage in your marketing funnel rather than waiting until you have 200 or more recipients to qualify for bulk mailing.

Bring them back to your website: Onboarding new customers requires a strategically planned process. Often, companies send a welcome email, or a few follow-ups, to bring a prospect back to their website.

If a prospect used your unique URL or QR code, send them a follow-up direct mail piece thanking them for taking an interest, and make sure to include information that shares your company’s values to get them interested.

There’s also another successful way to bring your potential customers back to your website as well with Mailbox Retargeting. If someone visits your website, through an online ad, email, or just simply word of mouth, this direct mail retargeting solution can identify the individual and will send them a postcard and email to encourage them to come back.

Stage 3: Convert

Now that you have built brand awareness and have gotten your potential customer’s attention, it’s time to send them the perfect call-to-action to get them to buy or sign up.

The best way you can do this is through direct mail while including an irresistible and exclusive offer.

Consider a discount code or coupon along with an intriguing call-to-action that your recipients can’t pass up on.

We discussed the 3-advertisement rule above, and the 3rd direct mail piece you send has the perfect timing to convert your prospect into a customer. And when you give your audience a special offer, they have even more of an incentive to make a purchase.

Stage 4: Engage & Encourage Repeat Business

You may have made a sale and gained a new customer, but there is still work to be done.

The next step in the marketing funnel is to engage with your customers in the hopes that they become loyal customers. After all, most of a business's sales are from repeat buyers.

Here are a few ways you can engage with your customers and create stronger customer relationships:

Send them a thank you: A simple thank you goes a long way. If you send a post-purchase thank you email, try sending your customers a personalized thank you postcard as well.

Sending this type of customer appreciation message will help turn your new customers into loyal and repeat customers.

Personalizing your thank you message is just icing on the cake and is extremely affordable with Variable Data Printing.

You can even integrate your direct mail into your CRM so that your thank you message is automatically sent to your customer once they make a purchase. You can even include a discount code to encourage them to purchase again.

Wish your customer a happy birthday: What better way to gain a customer's trust and loyalty than wishing them a happy birthday?

With a birthday mailer you can include a personalized offer or incentive to visit your store or order something online.

There are several ways you can achieve a successful birthday marketing campaign to build lasting relationships, however one strategy that marketers have found very successful is by automating their birthday mailers.

They achieve this by integrating direct mail into their CRM and then setting up a trigger so each month an automated postcard is sent to customers who have a birthday with each corresponding month.

Conclusion

Direct mail is a powerful medium. In fact, it has a 90% open rate compared to 23% for emails. On top of that 70% of consumers simply prefer receiving direct mail advertisements over digital ads. That’s why incorporating direct mail into your marketing funnel is so important.

With the tips and strategies, we’ve included above, you can start turning more prospects into loyal customers in no time.

For more information on some direct mail strategies, you can incorporate into your marketing funnel, click below to visit our advanced mailing page today.