Direct mail campaigns

Direct mail is a marketing strategy that uses printed media to send offers and advertising to a customer’s physical address.

Direct mail is an effective way to help your brand stand out in the age of digital ads and overflowing email inboxes. With the right audiences, direct mail gives your brand a physical touchpoint with which you can make a positive impression on your customers.

Many direct-to-consumer companies prefer using direct mail because they can show the brand (and products) using a tangible format that customers can hold in their hands.

The right mix of creative advertising, physical design of what is sent to the customer, offer, and frequency often leads to higher customer response rates when compared to digital and media advertising.

Use householding to support a wide variety of householding use cases, such as:

• Deduplicating physical addresses to ensure that only one catalog is sent to each address

• Sending high-value customers periodic direct mail offers that are different from the quarterly catalogue

• Expanding digital marketing campaigns to include non-digital customers and customers who do not have an email address

• Aligning householding use cases to your larger marketing strategy

Householding table

Use the Merged Households table to build customer profiles by household, and then use segments and queries to build audiences by household using all of the attributes in your customer 360 database.

Build an audience

A good approach to building audiences for your direct mail campaigns is to put them into categories by current lifecycle status and value tier:

Lifecycle status	High value	Low value
Active	Use this group for most of your direct mail marketing campaigns.	Use this group as part of lookalike audience marketing campaigns. Use A/B testing to identify the most effective approaches for this group.
Inactive	Use this group as part of retention or reactivation marketing campaigns.	Deprioritize this group.

Use the customer lifecycle status and customer value tier attributes to compare combinations, and then identify the right combination to use with your direct mail campaign.

By value tier

To accurately budget for direct mail campaigns, marketers must determine the amount customers will spend. Use predicted CLV attributes to group customers into high-value and low-value categories based on their predicted spend in the coming year and then use these groupings to define effective segmentation strategies.

Predicted customer lifetime value represents the total value of all orders a customer is predicted to make if they return to make another purchase during the next 365 days.

Predicted customer value tiers represent a percentile grouping of customers by predicted customer lifetime value (pCLV). Value tier groupings include:

• Platinum: top 1% of customers

• Gold: top 1%-5% of customers

• Silver: top 5%-10% of customers

• Bronze: top 10%-25% of customers

• Medium: top 25%-50% of customers

• Low: bottom 50% of customers

To find predicted value tiers, start with the Predicted Customer Lifetime Value Tier attribute in the Predicted CLV Attributes table, and then set its condition to is in list. After the attribute appears in your segment, set the list values to include all of the value tiers you want to use in your segment.

By lifecycle status

Predicted lifecycle status represents the likelihood to purchase again, grouped by tiers: “active”, “cooling down”, “at risk”, “highly at risk”, and “lost”. These tiers are used for two types of customers: repeat customers and one-time buyers.

For repeat customers, lifecycle status groupings use the following thresholds:

1. A repeat customer with an “active” lifecycle status has a greater than 60% likelihood to purchase again.

2. A repeat customer with a “cooling down” lifecycle status has a 50-60% likelihood to purchase again.

3. A repeat customer with an “at risk” lifecycle status has a 35-50% likelihood to purchase again.

4. A repeat customer with a “highly at risk” lifecycle status has a 20-35% likelihood to purchase again.

5. A repeat customer with a “lost” lifecycle status has a less than 20% likelihood to purchase again.

To find predicted lifecycle status, start with the Predicted Customer Lifecycle Status attribute in the Predicted CLV Attributes table, and then select the is in list condition. After the attribute appears in your segment, set the list values to include all of the thresholds you want to use in your segment.

Set your list to the following values: “Cooling down” and “At risk”.

Align to campaign objectives

After you have associated your customers to their lifecycle status and value tier, align the audience to your overall marketing objectives for your direct mail campaign, such as what types of discount preferences, promo codes, or offers you want to use.

After determining which customer groups to market to, apply additional segments to align campaigns with your overall marketing goals. For example, you may want to focus on customers who opted in to receive emails. With the ability to add multiple segments, you can determine which groups are more inclined to make a purchase.

Track campaign performance

To understand how direct mail attribution impacts a multichannel marketing campaign, marketers need to clarify the difference between the direct mail campaign performance and return on investment. Marketers can track this performance by utilizing the following processes:

• A matchback is a process where a mail file–associated with a purchase credit–is matched back to untracked sales.

• A control group is the percentage of an audience who will not receive communications related to a marketing campaign. Use control groups to establish a baseline against which you can measure the success of a campaign over time.

  Tip

  Control groups are sometimes referred to as holdout groups.

• A single-touch attribution identifies the first and last marketing channels that a customer interacts with.

• A multi-touch attribution identifies each marketing channel that the customer has interacted while making a purchase.

Send to direct mail channels

Marketers can send audience lists from Amperity to a variety of channels that support direct mail campaigns.

Cross Country Computer

Cross Country Computer specializes in strategic solutions for companies that are seeking to evolve their marketing methods around acquiring, retaining, and developing valuable customers.

PebblePost

PebblePost offers a full-stack solution that leverages scaled proprietary data, algorithmic optimization, advanced measurement and analytics, along with a print and mail logistics network.

Use direct mail campaigns with PebblePost as part of marketing strategies to acquire and retain customers. Use direct mail campaigns to:

• Discover, engage, and convert new customers.

• Upsell, cross-sell, and win back existing customers.

PebblePost has built-in reporting and measurement that can track the outcomes of your direct mail campaigns across points of sale, whether online, in-store, or over the phone.

Other channels

Other direct mail channels are available as plugins through popular marketing automation platforms like Adobe Marketo, HubSpot, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Send audience lists to the marketing automation platform, and then use a plugin to manage the direct mail campaign.

Plugin	Description
Alyce	Alyce is a personal experience platform that enables marketers to more effectively reach customers using an AI-powered one-on-one gifting approach. Send query results or audience lists to Adobe Marketo, HubSpot, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and then use Alyce to manage your direct mail campaign.
Postal.io	Postal.io allows you to manage direct mail campaigns using customizable workflows and automated sends. Send query results or audience lists to Adobe Marketo, HubSpot, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and then use Postal.io to manage your direct mail campaign.
Sendoso	Sendoso is a send management platform that uses automated and scaled solutions to help marketers manage effective direct mail campaigns. Send query results or audience lists to Adobe Marketo, HubSpot, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and then use Sendoso to manage your direct mail campaign.