Digital Media Effectiveness Driven by Direct Mail
It’s time to consider direct mail in your digital first media campaigns.
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 2022, the total online ad spend is forecasted to reach over 12 billion dollars, accounting for 68.3% of the total ad market in Canada.¹
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, privacy regulation, and shifting consumer behaviours are forcing some advertisers to re-examine their digital investments.
In fact, the latest research we’ve been seeing reinforces what our clients have been saying.
- 94% of marketers said their companies’ customers are overwhelmed by the increased use of digital marketing since the start of COVID-19.²
- 75% of consumers agree they’re overwhelmed by the number of digital ads they see daily.²
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.
2. It works!
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.³
In the recent State of Direct Mail: Consumer Insights Report: ⁴
- 62% of consumers say direct mail has inspired them to act, most often visiting a brand website.
- 72% of consumers read direct mail immediately or on the same day they bring it inside their residence.
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.
Check out our Building Maximum Addressable Audiences insights post for more details.
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 latest 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 2022
- The Future of Direct Mail – SG360
- Association of National Advertisers -– Performance and Cost Metrics Across Direct Media
- Lob & Compare Media: The State of Direct Mail