Getting the Right Products in Front of the Right People With Direct Mail

With the holiday season upon us, retail marketers may find themselves wondering if they are using the right product marketing strategy to get the right products in front of the right people. To ensure success this time of year, retailers should consider using personalized direct mail to drive traffic to both physical and online storefronts.

Here are some tips for making that happen with direct mail:

Identify the Right Products

• Look inward at your data. Your database contains multitudes of great information that can help you build a strong product marketing strategy. Identifying what types of products your customers are purchasing this time of year will help you provide timely purchase reminders and product recommendations.
• Watch the abandoned shopping cart. Shoppers often fill up their online shopping cart but leave without making a purchase. This can be for many reasons: they thought the tax and/or shipping was too high, they don’t have the funds to make the purchase today but will resume shopping once they get paid, etc. Timely reminders sent within a day or two of the abandoned cart with a relevant offer for a discount or free shipping on the products they are looking for are great for prompting online shoppers to come back and make the purchase.

Identify the Right People

• Seek out your best customers. Retailers with smaller databases may be able to do this manually by sorting their customer list to show who is spending the most money, the most often, but larger retailers may want to consider using predictive modeling and other software to complete this task. Either way, identifying your best customers while filtering out irrelevant prospects or low-value customers will help your direct mail outreach be more fruitful, as this allows you to reach out to people that are more inclined to respond to your offer.
• Go beyond list segmentation. If you are looking to supplement your house list with a prospect list, there are many ways to identify prospects than you may be used to. It is no longer effective to pull general demographics, as today’s consumers are increasingly complex individuals with varying wants, needs, behaviors, and motivations. Finding the right ones that will resonate with your brand is critical.

Combine Them with The Right Messaging

• Move them to purchase. Once you have the products and people identified, the next step is to craft the right messaging that moves them to make the purchase. The key is to develop messaging that is consistent with the other channels in your omnichannel marketing approach.
• Have a clear offer and call-to-action. No matter what the next step is (visiting the physical store to take 20% off their purchase, visiting the online storefront for free shipping, etc.) make it clear what you want the recipient to do next. Tell them what the offer is and how they can redeem it.

Main Takeaway

The key to getting the right products in front of the right people is using personalized direct mail to drive traffic to your online storefront or brick-and-mortar store. Being clear and consistent in your messaging will make it easy for them to redeem your offer and spend money with you this holiday season.