Why You Should Use Direct Mail to Enhance Digital Campaigns
Direct mail drives results; here’s why it is time to add direct mail to your digital campaigns to improve targeting and reach.
Republished.
No matter what you sell, your customers and future customers live somewhere, and it’s time to innovate how we reach them.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen the upward trend of ad spend shift toward digital channels. In 2023, the total online ad spend reached just over 14 billion dollars, accounting for nearly 70% of the total ad market in Canada.¹ This digital ad spend is forecasted to grow even more in the years ahead.
While the ever-expanding digital advertising ecosystem continues to offer tremendous opportunities for marketers, many of our clients and partners are seeing their results in mainstay digital channels decrease. Over saturation, high competition, privacy regulation, and shifting consumer behaviours are forcing some advertisers to re-examine their digital investments.
Direct mail is resurgent in the marketing landscape.
Recently, direct mail has experienced a marketing renaissance, producing high ROI, engagement, and leading to greater investment in direct mail as an essential channel.
In fact, the latest research we see reinforces what our clients have been saying.
- Consumer sentiment about direct mail marketing is increasing. In 2023, 83% reported positive feelings about receiving direct mail, up from 61%.²
- Direct mail is among the top 3 marketing channels consumers trust the most – trusted by twice as many consumers as online display ads.³
By no means are we suggesting marketers pull their ad dollars away from digital. We believe that the ability to build and buy unique audiences across multiple digital channels will dramatically increase the effectiveness of digital.
What we are suggesting, is that it’s time to examine or re-examine the role of direct mail in your media mix.
Three reasons why we’re talking to clients about direct mail in a digital first media landscape:
1. Because no matter what, people live somewhere, geography matters.
In a digital world saturated with social media ads and online content, disconnected targeting across different media channels makes it difficult to cut through the noise to accurately reach audiences.
Fortunately, direct mail stands out from the pack to make an impression and resonate with target audiences. Now thanks to the postal code, direct mail serves as the key connection for effective omnichannel targeting today.
Learn how geographic targeting enhances digital advertising.
2. Direct mail works! And consistently delivers high results.
Data and insights have significantly increased the targeting and effectiveness of direct mail over the last few years. Direct mail campaigns receive response rates that are five to nine times higher than digital campaigns, according to the Association of National Advertisers.⁴
In the State of Direct Mail: 2024 Marketing Report⁵ and 2023 Consumer Insights Report⁶:
- 84% of marketers agreed that direct mail provides the highest ROI and the best response and conversion rates of all the channels they use.
- 64% of consumers say that direct mail has inspired them to take action, including exploring websites and reviews or making a purchase.
3. Finally, we can now accurately connect digital to the household.
For many advertisers, this is the innovation they’ve been looking for to reconsider direct mail or for traditional direct mail marketers, such as not-for-profits, to expand their digital media buys. The ability to precisely reach the same audience, in a privacy compliant, manner online and at home.
There’s a classic saying: “what’s old becomes new again”, that is certainly true for the six-digit postal code in the digital age.
Postal Codes: The Ultimate Common ID
Connecting consumer insights to media activation is what we do best and using the six-digit postal code as a unique common identifier makes that possible.
The Canada Post postal code is a powerful common identifier, with intelligentVIEW it:
- Connects digital, terrestrial, consumer segment and customer data.
- Is stable, persistent, anonymized and privacy compliant.
- Offers 100% Canadian household coverage.
- Provides audience profiling with intelligentVIEW’s data sources and your first-party data.
How do we do this? We call it our secret sauce.
First, the intelligentVIEW platform aggregates an abundance of data sources, regardless of vintage, size, geography, and frequency, and builds them into a single self-validating data ecosystem.
We’ve built Canada’s largest, up-to-date addressable audience database powered by tens of thousands of data attributes for marketers to segment and understand audiences.
For more, read our insights post on how CiG’s unique data ecosystem delivers the latest data and insights for precision targeting.
Next, with our partners, we connect these privacy compliant audiences, built by using postal codes as a common ID, with digital media. This is achieved by connecting opt-in, privacy compliant, Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs) to actual street addresses and postal codes.
The secret sauce is making our clients and future clients consider direct mail in their digital campaigns.
Read our use cases:
Lifestyle changes lead to new opportunities. See how Financial Services can deliver insight driven, precise trigger marketing programs.
Data is driving new revenue streams for retailers. Here is how they can leverage their first party data to drive effective omni-channel campaigns.
Breakdown silos and visualize new markets. Look at 3 ways Canadian Telecoms can identify new opportunities, target look-alikes, and expand existing networks with mapping tools.
Lead list fatigue is one of the biggest challenges in the NFP sector. Here are 5 ways not-for-profits can maximize their marketing efficiencies.
Sources:
- Insider Intelligence: Canada Ad Spending 2023
- The Future of Direct Mail 2023 – SG360
- MarketingSherpa
- Association of National Advertisers -– Performance and Cost Metrics Across Direct Media
- Lob & Compare Media: The State of Direct Mail 2024 – Marketing Report
- Lob & Compare Media: The State of Direct Mail 2023 – Consumer Insights Report