What Is Direct Mail Retargeting?

By Sarah Harris

If you’ve ever gotten a piece of junk mail, you know that it’s not a terribly effective way to market. Unlike direct mail retargeting, junk mail isn’t intended for a specific recipient. Instead, the senders flood an area with the same message, hoping that a few will respond. Shotgun approaches like this are widely hated because they feel impersonal and wasteful. 

On the other hand, retargeting fixes this problem by using personalized messaging to get better results.

How Does Direct Mail Retargeting Work?

When a potential customer interacts with your website, it might just be to browse, sign up for a newsletter or put some items on their wishlist. Perhaps they’re not ready to buy yet, or they’re just weighing their options. 

But thanks to this interaction, you can check your analytics to track user behavior. And now, with direct mail retargeting, the potential customer can receive physical mail as part of an effort to convert them into an actual buyer instead of a window shopper.

How to Retarget Website Visitors

For a mail retargeting campaign to be successful, the potential customer must feel like the focus is on them. You have to show them that your product or service will fill a need in their life. Direct mail works when the consumer doesn’t get the uncomfortable feeling that you’re just trying to sell something.

Step 1: Ensure Your Website Has the Right Settings

In the course of your online browsing and shopping experiences, you’ve no doubt seen pop-ups telling you that the site uses cookies. Many people accept or decline without realizing what these bits of information actually do, but it’s these cookies that are how the site gets your information for mail retargeting efforts. They also have a benefit for the user — they can save individual preferences for a better and more convenient shopping experience.

In addition to cookies, you can also track user habits through their internet protocol (IP) address, a device’s unique numerical code that acts as an identifier when it connects to a network. Finally, email address matching is another effective route for sussing out names and addresses for physical mailbox retargeting. The point is that your website needs to be collecting this data in one way or another if you want to be able to reach these users with a retargeting campaign.

Step 2: Understand Your Customer Journey

The customer journey is complex and personal, and it’s important to think from the perspective of a consumer. What’s the reason they left that item sitting in their online shopping cart? Why do they have so many items on their wishlist, and yet they haven’t made a purchase? This is where you will need to work on understanding their motivations as to what is preventing them from completing a sale. 

By tying together disparate pieces of information — such as which parts of your website they spend the most time on, consumer buying habits and newsletter sign-up metrics — you can get a fuller picture of the pain points that push customers to make purchases.

Step 3: Personalize Your Messaging

A simple postcard retargeting message can go a long way toward addressing your customers’ concerns in an informal, creative way. 

Is an item too expensive? There’s a sale coming up! 

Worried about durability and longevity? Offer warranty plans and tout your service department. 

By analyzing consumer habits and their interactions with your website, you can narrow down their potential hangups, personalize your messaging and move them through the sales pipeline. 

Step 4: Send Your Ideas over to Print Brind Ship

When reaching out to potential customers, your direct mail items need to be eye-catching and high quality. 

What are your ideas? Print Bind Ship can make them a reality. Postcards with handwritten notes, pamphlets, special offer mailers and books — we even create nonwritten promotional items like phone chargers and free samples of products. If you want attention, we’ll make sure you get it.

Step 5: Launch Your Campaign

Print Bind Ship can handle every step of your campaign with our Mail Genius omnichannel marketing platform. Whether you have an existing client base or not, Mail Genius uses web traffic data to see how users are interacting with your website. This will give us insight into their habits and allow us to get a piece of direct mail into their hands within days. 

Step 6: Test, Track and Measure Performance

Every campaign needs to check whether it’s heading toward success. After you have a new idea to reach customers and we implement it, it’s important to track how that idea performs to see whether it’s converting customers or not. The best part is that you don’t have to wait to see whether an idea falls flat on its face. With Print Bind Ship and Mail Genius, you get constant adjustments to ensure efforts are as successful as possible. 

Become a Direct Mail Genius with Print Bind Ship

Direct-mail retargeting is so much more effective than spamming thousands of residents with impersonal junk mail. With Mail Genius, Print Bind Ship gives you the tools to identify potential leads and convert them into loyal customers. From collecting user data to creating fun, memorable mail campaigns, we’re with you all the way. Contact Print Bind Ship today and start getting more sales.

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