Convert Sceptics of Direct Mail into Loyal, Returning Customers - Blog2Day

Most direct mail marketers today are turning to direct mail to drive growth and repeat business customers’ lifetime value. With very few response rates crushing digital marketing efforts strongly, direct mail postcards are a strong medium for repeat customers or say retention marketing.

But marketers who focus on retention may ignore the fact that by integrating correct strategies suggested by direct mail marketing companies, you can not only retain customers but can also convert repeat customers to loyal customers.

Who are the Repeat Customers and Loyal Customers?

It’s not certain that a repeat customer will be a loyal customer. There are a number of direct mail customer loyalty programs that fall under retention criteria. If your messaging aims to close a deal or prevent churn – but fails to build a deep, emotional connection with the customer, then it’s pure retention.

According to a direct mail campaign services provider, retention is if existing customers still purchase from you, while loyalty is a customer consistently prefers to not only purchase from you but also engage with you. It is a slight and profitable distinction, and an exciting 82% of American adults say they are loyal to brands. Suppose customer loyalty is a bond that is required to be nurtured, while retention is just nudging a customer to make them purchase a product by providing some benefit.

While retention is relatively important, it should not be considered genuine customer loyalty. Loyal customers can be essential for a brand’s success and longevity. Loyalty isn’t something that can be achieved easier, but if you are sending smart direct mail, you don’t have to go for retention alone. You can create effective retention strategies while building loyalty through trust and customer connections along the way.

3 Ways to Encourage Customer Loyalty with Direct Mail

Direct mail is perfect to initiate customer loyalty as it receives a much stronger response than digital communications. This is because of the nature of mail. When you want to connect or communicate with your customers, send them something attractive such as a postcard with the help of mailing companies in USA.

With using modern direct mail software, you can capitalize on the already high emotional impact of direct mail by personalizing direct mail postcards and even activating them directly from your CRM.

Since providing customer value lifetime and business goals differ from brand to brand, there’s no perfect approach for direct mail customer loyalty marketing.

However, these three ideas would help you foster loyalty for a brand:

Helpful Reminder or Invitation Postcard

Provide value and stay on customers’ minds by mailing personalized reminder postcards or invitations for seasonal purchases, scheduled services, special offers or dates, and upcoming events.

Studies show that most American consumers not only read and sort their direct mail pieces, but other people also look forward to do the same. This makes it ideal to send reminder messages, ideal for the mailbox versus the inbox. Sending your audience a valuable reminder or special invitation through the best direct mail printing companies can help them feel appreciated and appreciative, enabling a more loyal connection.

The Brand Advocacy Postcard

Send a special offer to customers who refer their friends, or just review recent purchases or engage in the online community of consumers.

You should also be able to enable and foster brand advocacy on all of your mailers, making it easier for your customer counselors to share information and thoughts about your brand. Do this by mentioning a call-to-action to like or comment on your social accounts or to join communities.

The Cross-Sell Special Discount Postcard

That’s where converting repeat customers into loyal ones strategy comes in place. While it isn’t necessary that every repeat customer would be a loyal one, it would be if they purchase more than they are likely to. That’s true when they purchase a lot of products.

As a direct mail marketing company in USA says, direct mail is a strong medium to encourage cross-sells. According to the USPS Household Diary Study, the majority of households who have income more than $65k make purchases as a result of direct mail.

Do you need ideas for cross-selling postcards? Use purchase history data to foster customers to try buying a new product based on your information about their interests. Or, consider sending postcards that offer current customers a special discount on a new product launch.

Another tried and tested method is to simply offer an effective discount on the next purchase, with a less order qualification. Choose the minimum order amount in a strategic approach so that the customer would definitely purchase various products.

Measure and Analyse Your Campaign’s Performance

Here are several KPIs that you can use to measure and analyze your direct mail campaign’s performance:

● Responses / No. of sent pieces = Response rate

● No. of orders / Responses = Conversion rate

● Campaign cost / No. of orders = CPA

● Revenue / No. of orders = Avrg. order size

● Avg. order size – CPA = Revenue on each order

● (Revenue – cost of campaign) / Campaign cost = ROI.

If you still are unsure about quantifying results and determining your ROI for direct mail campaigns, there are a lot of direct mail campaign companies who will help you with the solution for your business and will help you to partner with the ability to pair standalone marketing services with their direct mail campaigns.

They will help you with:

● Tracks the effectiveness of our customer’s direct mail campaigns

● Provides solutions for the challenges that revolve around direct mail as an offline marketing channel.

● Increases the result of our customer’s direct mail campaigns by 23-46%.

Final Words

Undoubtedly, you can’t turn every customer into a loyal one no matter how amazing your marketing may be, but by sending loyal campaigns like those mentioned above, you can definitely make your customer convert more of them.