Why Direct Mail Is Still The Best Way To Engage With Your Audiences

It may come as a surprise to some that, even in our incredibly digital era, direct mail is still the most effective way to engage (especially fundraise) with your audiences.

That is, of course, if you do it with the right printing partner.

Marketing and fundraising departments might shudder at the thought of producing a direct mail campaign instead of quickly buying ad space on Google or social media, or even via email. But broken down, the process of procuring that ad space is quite similar, except printed and personalized mail campaigns outperform the rest.

If you’re hoping to increase brand awareness, engage with your audience, procure donations, or have them buy in to another product or subscription, consumers’ digital inboxes and iPhone scrolling are over-saturated with ads.

Millennials and Gen Z have mastered scrolling by all but the most exciting and accurately personalized ads, whereas Gen X and Baby Boomers report being overall more engaged with their mail. It is easier, after all, to trash an email after 1 second of attention, than to trash a well-designed piece of mail.

Here are those ideas broken down by the data:

1. Direct mail campaigns required 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital ads.
2. Activation in parts of the brain relating to motivation was 20% higher for direct mail compared to digital ads.
3. Recall was a whopping 70% higher when exposed to a brand via direct mail rather than digitally.

We like to think about this the same way we’ve seen steady (and even sometimes increasing) interest in hard copy books in a digital era. Yes, libraries have closed, book stores have become few and far between, and people get the news on Facebook instead of the newspaper. That decline was something people were much more interested in around 2010-2015.

But even the youngest generations still know there’s something special when flipping through the pages of a book compared to a Kindle. Even the generations who grew up completely intertwined with technology want book stores and paperbacks because the type of engagement is different – and valuable.

So, when it comes to process, here’s where your printing partner comes into play:

Just like with a digital ad campaign, for a direct mail campaign, you need to:

• Design with best practices for that channel or medium
• Personalize (in more ways than knowing the recipient’s first name)
• Segment audiences
• Set and measure KPIs like open rates, response rates, and more

Then of course there’s setting up the actual delivery.

While this hasn’t always been possible given traditional printing and mailing techniques, and remains an arduous process for many printing partners around the U.S., it’s something made incredibly easy, accurate, and fast with the technology we have here at Oregon Printing Communications, as one of the best print shops in Dayton, Ohio, and beyond.

With our Indigo technology (and other capabilities) not only can we help you plan, design, and print your campaigns, we can do more with personalization, unique and eye-catching user experience materials, mailing, performance measurement, and way more.

We don’t like to say print campaigns are making a comeback, because we personally know they’ve never gone out of style, it all just depends on who you choose as your print partner.

Get more resources or request a quote for your campaign here!