Whether it’s through social networks, blogs, or instant messaging, today’s consumers are increasingly digitally connected. A weekend on the top of a mountain checking email is no longer a fantasy or, depending on whom you ask, a bad joke. And, perhaps because players in the digital market have ‘data’ woven into their DNA, digital media delivers increasingly relevant content.
Did consumers start asking for more relevance or did marketers in the digital space train them to expect it? Or is relevance like immunity to antibiotics – the more you give, the more consumers need and the more resistant they become? Hard to say.
Either way, the implication for direct mail is profound: offer relevant content or be ignored.
If quality indeed trumps quantity, then Unaddressed Admail might be considered the least up to the challenge. After all, when viewed with a sceptical eye, Unaddressed Admail can easily be seen as a mass medium that advertisers use to blanket markets by geography.
But choosing Unaddressed Admail walks by geography alone is passé. Today postal walks can be carefully selected with a nod to tribal consumers whose buying habits and identities can be predicted and grouped by their socioeconomic cohort. For example, Canada Post’s Geopost Plus service helps customers be more successful in their marketing efforts by only mailing those customers that have a high potential to act and want their marketed products. A new enhancement to this is the geospatial analysis where postal walks and addresses can be targeted based on lifestyle clusters.
And earlier this year, Canada Post rolled out its hybrid service, Acquisition Admail, which allows customers to mail to individual addresses within a postal walk. The benefit of the hybrid service is two-fold: one, the piece appears more personalized as it is addressed to a household; two, mailing lists can be purged against existing customer databases so that only potential new customers are targeted, not the entire walk. A recent Canada Post case study explains how Calgary’s Pizza Hotline ran an Acquisition Admail test campaign to a list of potential customers generated by Canada Post. According to the study, sales in the first week jumped by 16 percent. The success of the campaign supports not just the new service but also Canada Post’s approach, which is to work in partnership with customers, leveraging their access to marketing research to help those customers use direct mail more effectively.
Similarly, Environics Analytics (EA) taps the propriety research done through PRIZMC2 to help their clients identify not just lifestyles and behaviours but also the social values, motivations, and mindsets driving those behaviours. One EA client, The Mississauga Library System in suburban Toronto, wanted to know what improvements their 18 branches could undertake to better serve the community. Particularly, they wanted to know which residents weren’t being well served by its branch network and how these non-users could be better accommodated. As EA’s website reveals, “EA analysts PRIZM-coded the postal codes of about 300,000 cardholders from the library system’s database of members. Using the PRIZM profiles, they created door handle promotional pieces, mailers and other outreach efforts intended to remind infrequent users of library offerings. Today the Mississauga Library System is rolling out programming and marketing efforts that speak to the needs of its diverse residents” (environicsanalytics.ca).
But perhaps the most logical response to the growing digital space lies in having mail pieces that direct customers online to micro-sites and response URLs. Once online, visitors responding to a mail piece can be tracked as they would be for an online campaign. Driving customers to a website also adds a valuable dimension to a direct mail piece as it engages customers across both mediums.
And closing the circle is important. As Marshall McLughan said, “the medium is the message”. Relevant content and integrated campaigns do not just serve to deliver the message; they are themselves a signal that marketers respect the consumer’s desire for relevance and convenience.
“Content is King”, goes the saying. But the phrase is misleading. Today content engages individuals, not kingdoms. Mail boxes across the land are listening.
Note: This article was first published in the April 2010 issue of Direct Marketing.
