Direct Mail Marketing Automation: July 2021

Automated Postcard Mailing

Postcard marketing was always among those marketing forms that bear excellent results. Even in today’s time, when digital interactions have become part and parcel of everyone’s lives, it continues to impress customers and prospects and get them to respond. However, it is undeniable that previously, any type of direct mail marketing was costly, difficult to conduct and track. But things have changed now. Automation has helped marketers streamline their direct mail activities and avail a whole set of advanced capabilities.

Automated postcard mailing does not only make direct mailing easier and efficient but helps marketers get a better response and conversion rate. In this blog, we will discuss more automated postcard mailing, its benefits, importance, and ways to optimise it.

Reasons to Automate Postcard Mailing

There are a number of reasons why you should use automated postcard mailing. While postcard marketing has survived all the modern digital marketing strategies and is still prefered by marketers, it is important to do it right. At this point, automation comes in to combine one of the oldest offline marketing forms with new technology.

Postcards are impressive direct mail items. They can easily create an impact on the minds of your recipients and persuade them to complete the CTA. Plus, the tangible nature of direct mail that allows people to see and touch it only adds to its benefits. Unlike other mail items, postcards do not need envelopes. It can be tricky to design postcards as the mailing address, return address, keep clear zone, and stamps are all printed on them. Automated postcard mailing solutions like PostGrid enable you to design eye-catching postcards and print them in the right way.

Automation also helps marketers save plenty of time spent researching vendors and negotiating prices. PostGrid’s postcard print and mail API offers all-in-one rates for everything from designing to mailing. Moreover, it can help you get huge postal discounts by bulk mailing, presorting, and several such methods.

Verified addresses, accuracy, timely delivery, and tracking capabilities are some of the other reasons why you should automate your postcard mailing effort.

Personalise Your Postcards and Build Segmented Mailing Lists

Sending out general postcards with not even the recipient’s first name cannot help you gather a lot of responses. Such general marketing strategies are often failed because people do not feel the need to respond to these non-personalised postcards. On the other hand, personalisation can flip the entire game for you. It can grab your recipients’ attention quickly and make them feel special. With the help of variable data printing offered by automated direct mail solutions like PostGrid, it has become easy to personalise every single postcard among thousands. You can integrate PostGrid’s postcard print and mail API into your CRM and use certain demographics and factors for personalisation.

As much as you personalise your postcards, it is recommended that you also first segment your mailing lists and target a specific audience that fits your buyer persona. Again, targeting certain demographics and psychographics such as age, income, gender, marital status, buying habits, and preferences can help you build targeted mailing lists. PostGrid can help you build such mailing lists from scratch.

Gone are the days when you printed the same thousand postcards and mailed them out to anyone in the hope that they would be interested in your brand and respond to your mail. With automation, you can determine your prospects beforehand and then reach out to them with the most convincing message possible.

Include Infographics, a Relevant CTA, and an Exciting Offer

Coming to the contents of your postcard, there are some basics. Marketers should take care to include an easy and upfront CTA that recipients are willing to complete. A smart trick is to lure recipients into completing the CTA by adding an undeniable offer. Hence, both the CTA and offer should complement one another and support the common cause of getting maximum responses.

Having said that, it is often difficult to determine the CTA that can be included in your postcard content. While some companies jump straight to the sales part and ask their prospects to purchase, that can sometimes be a buzzkill. Postcard marketing works best when it is used as a means of lead generation and not direct sales. Therefore, asking people to scan a QR code, visit your website, set up a demo session, or something similar can be a good CTA, especially when you are interacting with someone for the first time.

Similarly, your offer should be something exciting and interesting to your audience. Extra credits, discounts, and some other benefits should do the task.

Another thing to note is that creativity is appreciated; after all, your postcards should be attention-grabbing and attractive. Recipients should want to read them. You can add some relevant images and infographics for doing so.

A/B Testing and Mail Tracking Abilities

Out of all the amazing features that automated postcard mailing offers, testing and tracking are the most beneficial ones. They help you analyse your postcard marketing activities and also guide you on how to improve and do better.

Before conducting a large-scale campaign, it is best to send out a few mail items and test their performance and effectiveness. If this test campaign doesn’t work, you would have saved yourself a lot of time, effort, and money. Moreover, you can make the necessary modifications and move ahead. A/B testing allows businesses to make the right decision. Marketers can test different designs, colours, graphics, and copy to check what works the best for their brand. They can get several variations to compete against each other and choose the top-performing one. This way, marketers can assure their campaign success prior to conducting it.

Talking of tracking, you first need to determine how you want to track responses and engagements. There are several ways to track responses like adding a QR code, pURL, dedicated phone number, unique email address, redeemable discount codes, and so on. These tracking factors can help marketers have a clear view of all the responses, which they can follow up on and drive conversions.

Through these ways, you can easily combine offline and online marketing. This combination allows you to tap on all of your conversion chances and opportunities. Multiple touchpoints mean an extended database, which you can make complete use of through automated postcard mailing.

API Integration

API integration offers more than one benefit to direct mail marketers. Firstly, they can skip through the part where manual data entry is required. The integration helps in speedy data import useful to personalise mail items. Secondly, they can integrate with any marketing platform such as Shopify, Zoho, Magento, Hubspot, and more. You can start printing and mailing postcards right from your own preferred platform.

With the Zapier integration, marketers can connect with over 1,600 apps to gather data. The process of integrating PostGrid’s automated direct mail API with your CRM is relatively simple and quick. It makes sending direct mail as easy as sending emails.

Conclusion

Automated postcard mailing is easy, efficient, productive, and highly result-bearing. Through automation, you can personalise postcards, segment mailing lists, test different postcards for their features, track and measure results, get campaign analytics, and improve your overall direct mailing journey.

With bulk mailing capabilities, international coverage, address verification, pre-built templates for speedy designing, and no minimum volume requirements, PostGrid offers excellent automated postcard mailing solutions.