Direct mail continues to be a powerful channel to identify, engage and convert high value. But these benefits can be accompanied by challenges. For experienced direct mail marketers its continuing to find qualified prospects to mail profitably. For marketers exploring direct mail, its looking beyond digitally native strategies to invest in a more expensive channel and prove ROI.
In response to these challenges, modern direct mail is constantly evolving, exploring new creative ways to merge digital strategies and drive growth. Here are three powerful, yet underutilized, ways to generate qualified direct mail prospect audiences.
Capture unknown web traffic, match IP address to household address, and then optimize for direct mail. Yes, it is that simple. However, there are a few partners needed and parameters worth considering to guarantee you mail the best of the bunch.
Not all visitors are created equal, some really engage with product or content, while others bounce quickly. Identify key metrics to highlight engaged web visitors, number of pages visited, time spent on site, or bounce time, and use those to segment. Then match top engaged groups to household address.
Alliant capabilities include matching IP address at the household level, then matching that audience with the Alliant DataHub. Matched with a rich 2nd party data resource, hundreds of variables and affinities are now available on this audience. The easiest next step, especially for direct mail newbies, is to apply an on-demand model that optimizes for direct mail. Direct mail marketers with more time and historical data can take it to the next level by developing a custom direct mail model based on previous campaign files. You can parallel path developing this model while segmenting and matching the prospect audience. Once complete, apply the model to the web-sourced audience and target top performing groups to ensure your campaign meets its goals.
No need to toss any consumers who may have fallen into a lower scoring group of the model. While they may not be qualified for direct mail, they clearly show interest in your brand and are worth retargeting in other channels like social, programmatic or CTV.
Similar to web traffic, use social followers of your brand or even competitor brands as a seed audience for direct mail modeling. If more scale is needed, look beyond just followers to hashtags related to your product or content. This is a great way for brands that do not have historical direct mail data to create targeted audiences.
Alliant recently helped a financial services app launch with great success using this metric, creating several look-alike audiences based on social seeds from the brand followers, competitors and other social signals. These socially sourced segments performed 74% higher than the campaign average. The results exceeded expectations and regularly refreshed social look-alike audiences became part of their monthly acquisition efforts.
As a leader in programmatic audiences, Alliant has seen broad adoption and use of propensity models. The taxonomy of available audiences, with 1,400+ Brand, Product and Interest Propensities, is not limited to digital – activation is just as easy in any channel, especially direct mail.
Propensity modeling is the process of identifying consumer segments with a strong likelihood of taking a desired action based on their predicted tendencies. Alliant Propensities enable flexibility to reach prospects based on transactional purchase data and social signals. A propensity may already exist for your brand, but look beyond to competitive brands for conquesting, or complimentary brands. The Alliant Data Science team can quickly identify the top ten brands that align with your brand for testing.
The best part, propensity models are on-demand and ready to deploy at a moments notice. These are great audiences to easily test in an upcoming campaign. And not to sound like a broken record, but they can always be enhanced further with an on demand or custom direct mail optimization model as well.
Looking to explore any of these ideas for your next direct mail campaign? Reach out to the Help Desk and we will connect you with a direct mail audience expert. Based on your direct mail experience and historical 1st party data, our team will tailor some test options to help you drive results and ROI in your next mailing.