6 Easy Steps to Automate Mail
How heavy is your workload lately? With a business to run, constant marketing strategies needing attention, and employees to keep happy, your own stress levels might be hitting the roof. And the work just never seems to end.
Consider this – What if you could drop some of the stress from your workload plate AND improve your marketing at the same time? This is actually possible, and it starts with automated offline mail.
You’re probably familiar with direct mail marketing, and may be using digital marketing automation solutions to get your messages out. But as you might have heard, direct mail marketing is trending hot, and it’s all thanks to automated mail designed to complement your current digital marketing efforts.
Automated mail is the result of new SaaS tech and traditional direct mail. Basically, with recent tech developments, it’s become much easier for businesses like yours to plan campaigns, trigger mail in an automated fashion, and send communications at a lower price. This gets your messages in hands and shows that your company is there to support the customer throughout the sales journey.
Here are a few things to consider if you’re looking to automate and boost your marketing:
- Return to Direct Mail Marketing
Maybe you’re still questioning if direct mail would really pay off for your company. After all, everything these days seems to be about digital marketing. So why should you allocate a portion of your budget towards direct mail?
Think back to the last time you scrolled through Facebook. Do you remember much about the ads you passed over? Do you remember seeing ads at all? Or are you mostly remembering that meme your coworker shared?
The fact is, even though digital marketing reaches a lot of people, it’s also ignored by a lot of people. And even if people see ads on social media or Google, how often do they actually click on them?
You can answer that based on your company’s insights and analytics. But compared to how many people the ads actually reach, the number of clicks is likely to be much lower. People have grown to filter out ads when they’re online. It now takes a lot for a digital ad to generate the kind of response you really want.
And even if you send emails to customers, chances are that they are either going to junk folders or are being ignored. In today’s environment, people have too many things vying for their attention in their inboxes and social media.
Direct mail marketing is how you can stand out. The amount of direct mail a single person receives in one day is much less than the number of emails, phone calls and ads that a typical person comes across. That means they are more likely to pay attention to a tangible direct mail message. Since most people still check their mailboxes daily, they’re likely to remember your direct mail advertising than your digital marketing attempts.
And with the ease of using automated mail companies, the effort (and cost) of putting out direct mail is lower than it’s ever been. Not to mention, it’s more customizable as well. So once you decide that direct mail marketing is worth looking into, your next step is to…
2. Use a Third-Party Automated Mail Service
Many companies offer automated mail services. Researching which one is best for you might not seem worth the effort, but here are some criteria to make that research easier.
The top automated mail companies will offer:
- Multiple mail options
- Printing and mailing within 48 hours or less
- An Application Programming Interface (API)
- Strong understanding of direct mail campaign strategies AND marketing
- Readily available customer assistance
Remember, it’s absolutely essential for an automated mail service company to understand how marketing works. Some companies may offer quality printing, but if they don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish with print and how it fits into your marketing, then they can’t address all of your needs.
While other companies may offer the listed services, CPMI Solutions offers all of them and more. We are a team of print and marketing experts, and we work with you through every step of your campaigns. So if you’re looking for automated mail services, start by looking at CPMI Solutions.
But, whichever company you choose to rely on, make sure that they offer these quality services.
3. Invest in a CRM with an API
When you begin to work with an automated mail company, look at their data exchange options. Ideally, they’ll integrate with your existing Application Programming Interface, or API, to exchange your campaign, messaging, and customer information into.
They may have other data-sharing options, and if you want to test-drive the company with those other options, go ahead. But if you think you’ll be working with the company long-term, an API integration will truly automate the mailing process and will save you more time and effort.
By putting your data into an API, the information you need to send out marketing messages to customers will always be in quick easy reach. It also helps your marketing across all platforms be more cohesive.
Data exchange is really what makes automated mail work so well. It’s what simplifies the process of creating and sending direct mail to customers and leads, and it strengthens all of your marketing efforts.
4. Combine Your Online and Direct Mail Marketing
When you start planning your direct mail marketing strategy, take a good look at your digital branding. While direct mail tends to stand out more than digital noise, building your direct mail branding off of your digital branding is key. As with any omnichannel marketing, the goal is to have a cohesive feel across all marketing touchpoints.
See, your company will stand out more if people see your advertising online and in their actual mailbox. These potential customers will also be more likely to stop and click through your online advertising if they recognize your company from their direct mail.
Combining the efforts and branding of your digital and direct mail marketing helps your brand reach more people – and helps them remember you better. You know better than anyone that it typically takes multiple encounters with a product for a customer to actually purchase the product.
So let one of those ways be direct mail, and match it to your digital marketing and see how effective you can be.
5. Keep a Targeted Audience
Unlike old-fashioned direct mail where you just sent mail to as many people as you could and hoped for the best results, a targeted audience will respond even better if they have already connected with your brand, or have expressed interest in your products or services.
Think of how effective you’ll be as you re-engage with someone who started to educate themselves about your company, but got distracted and may not have completed the purchase. Now you can put them on a different marketing journey and use information you know about them to send targeted messages at any stage of the sales funnel. This ensures that your mail is relevant, timely and personalized.
Plus with a CRM integration, you can also track the results of those who receive direct mail vs. who stayed in the control or hold-out group. No more broadcasting to everyone and hoping for a bite, just focused marketing with powerful, trackable results.
With the ability to target audiences and track results, direct mail marketing has become just as viable and valuable as digital marketing, if not more so.
6. Pick Your Timeline and Targets
Timely messages make a huge difference in marketing, so automated mail services do their best to print and mail your materials quickly. In fact, at CPMI Solutions, our digital printing processes go from receiving your data to mailing it within 24-48 hours.
That means you don’t have to schedule direct mail weeks in advance. Within two days of getting data, your messages will be on their way to your customers with virtually no effort on your part.
And with the targeting abilities of automated mail, you won’t be wasting time or money to make it happen.
Even better, with advances in printing, you no longer need to make massive bulk orders to send direct mail. You can even request a single print for a single customer if needed. You have so much more convenience and flexibility with direct mail marketing than you ever have before.
Free Consultation with CPMI Solutions
Did you know that CPMI Solutions is more than an automated mail printing service? We also provide strategic marketing consultations to help you generate leads, reactive them, accelerate sales, motivate action, and provide relevant education. We do this using 30+ years of proven direct mail practices and are ready to help your team. So if you’re in need of ideas of how to incorporate direct mail into your marketing strategy…..Talk to us.
We offer FREE strategic campaign planning sessions to help our clients make the most of their direct mail campaigns. During your session, we’ll talk about your goals, creative best practices, available formats, audiences to target, behaviors to address, segmentation, and more.
Questions? Reach out to us today at contact@cpmisolutions.com or 877.410.5503.
