I recently witnessed a conversation about
“death” of paper direct mail due to “life” of web presence and blogs. I’m not exactly sure why, but someone seems to declare “death” of a marketing technique every few months…I guess that’s how some consultants stay employed – announce “death” of something and create “life” of something new. Anyway, I disagree with notion paper direct mail is dead and as such thought I’d share how we integrate paper direct mail into our marketing, sales, and lead nurturing systems.We do a fair amount of direct mail – postcards, sales letters, brochures, etc. – to generate sales leads and provoke interest in our and our customer’s services. We integrate paper direct mail with our web presence to provoke ongoing interest using unique landing pages specific to each direct mail piece and routinely use sales letters to generate leads.
Provoking Ongoing Interest To warm suspects for sales opportunities what we do is create a direct paper mail piece – postcard, letter, brochure, etc. – and send it to a list of targeted employees at specific companies we’ve identified as part of a customer profile. We provide a unique URL to continue dialogue from a particular subject within a paper direct mail piece – in essence we ask a question in paper direct mail piece and answer question on a landing page. The landing page continues flow of information from printed source. We are careful to keep font, color, graphics, etc. same on landing page – this bridges paper direct mail to our web presence.
Example: We did a direct mail postcard for a customer not long ago. The piece begged question of how outside counsel spent their time; a graphic included two business people standing by a water cooler. The URL that continued dialogue of managing outside counsel was watercooler.customersdomain.com.
We accomplish two things by employing landing pages this way: we track specific interest of our customers and prospects (we track stats for landing pages and correlate it to a mailing schedule), and bridge suspects to “stickiness” of our web presence. Our belief is if you can hold an audience, you can continue to market to them. We’ve found this technique highly effective in bringing prospects to our site.
