Direct Mail Is Having a Renaissance in Marketing. Here’s How to Capitalize On It.

By Heike Young

True: All marketing is digital, and digital continues to attract more of the marketing budget.

But print’s definitely not dead. In the everyday customer journey, print continues to play a role across industries and functions:

• When you get an appointment reminder card from the dentist.
• When you receive a travel magazine from AAA or a credit card company.
• When a newly opened restaurant in your neighborhood sends you coupons.

Clearly, marketing has changed a lot since all marketing was print and TV ads, but direct mail is finding an increasingly bigger role in the overall marketing mix.

That’s why we invited Yeva Roberts to the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce. Yeva is an expert on print marketing at PrintingForLess, a marketing technology company that does printing, kitting, and fulfillment.

In this episode, learn as Yeva explains how the customer journey has come full-circle to include print as a memorable marketing touchpoint.

Take a listen here:

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Here were a few top takeaways from this podcast episode.

“Nearly every industry is starting to adopt triggered direct mail—specifically financial services and healthcare. Marketers are seeing this capability as a reawakening for them. It’s about being able to integrate direct mail and reduce its footprint as part of its marketing budget over time.”

“The heart of this renaissance is personal selling for those end users: making a good first impression, retaining a relationship with the client, and sending a personalized, relevant note along with a well thought-out gift. This helps marketers nurture those relationships and create stronger connections.”

“Direct mail can support a digital strategy. For example, corporate marketing teams are using direct mail to drive organic growth of their email database. So if they don’t have an email address on file in the database, they’re able to quickly trigger a direct mail communication that invites someone to opt into an email program.”

“Another popular use case by e-commerce or retail is the abandoned shopping cart. If you have someone that abandoned a product or maybe even created a wishlist, being able to send a direct mail, personalized mail piece—that has a picture or photo of that product that they left in the cart the next day or a few days later—usually elicits a much higher response than just sending a follow up reminder email.”

“Right now, what marketers need to keep in mind is that customers actually enjoy getting mail. The mailbox is less cluttered. Just because advances in database and printing technologies have reduced the volume of mail that we get in our mailbox, that doesn’t mean print is dead or fading. The mail we do get at home, we’re excited to see.”

And that’s just scratching the surface of our conversation with Yeva Roberts. Get the complete low-down on print marketing in the customer lifecycle in this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast.

Join the thousands of smart marketers who already subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Stitcher.

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Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.