It’s no secret that social media has taken the world by storm. There are 3.5 billion active social media users worldwide and the average amount of time spent on social platforms is over 2 hours every single day.
This is a huge group of people who are heavily invested in their screen time and interaction with a social media app. This opens up doors of opportunity to find and engage with new customers/clients. However, it’s also a very busy competitive space.
When combining traditional mail with digital marketing, you can enhance the reach and impact of your campaigns. In this article, we’re going to focus on the connection between social media and direct mail and look at some simple ways you can integrate the two.
Direct Mail to Hook, Social to Follow
Direct mail should act as your hook. It’s a hugely successful way to get your message in front of a highly targeted audience. It’s a far less competitive space in 2019 compared to the digital world and it actually carries more trust. Believe it or not, because direct mail is tangible and ‘real’, it’s proven that recipients trust it more and feel as though it has more authority than a digital message. This is really important when it comes to getting attention and building a connection of trust which eventually results in action.
The other reason to lead with DM is that the demographics are much better developed and more precise. If you were to target Dentists in New Jersey who have purchased a Chevy in the last 12 months, that is doable with a direct mail list. It would be difficult to find anything like this for email or social media. We already know that “the list” is 70% of our success.
Once you’ve got the attention of a receiver, you can easily direct them to your social media channels if this is your goal. If it’s not a primary goal, simply including your social media handles (e.g @yourbusinessname ) and the platforms you’re present on can drive people towards them in the future.
Use Social Media to Communicate
Depending on your audience, you could use social media to collect responses. Facebook messenger is a very popular way a brand can communicate with their customers directly and privately. This type of campaign would probably be more effective when targeting 18-35-year-olds because it’s a group of people that will already communicate with businesses in this way.
In general, we should let customers contact us in ANY way they prefer – phone, fax, email, social media. Any additional channel we can give potential customers to reach us is a really good thing. If they prefer Facebook, then we want them to be able to use this. The same goes for other forms of social media.
In one of our recent articles, we discussed using premiums as a tool to collect responses. This is one way you can get customers to interact and make contact in order to redeem an offer.
Shout-out
Here’s another idea. Use part of your mail to focus on your offer and drive responses to that (whether that’s a call center or website). Use the other part of your campaign to shout about your social channels and what happens here. If you share exclusive discounts, giveaways and company info that will benefit customers on your social channels, let them know! Let them know why they should follow you on Instagram vs everyone else. What will they gain?
If you sell home-ware will they gain interior design inspiration, ideas for easy storage and ‘Insta-worthy’ décor tips? If you’re in real estate, will you share newly available homes on your Facebook page the minute they go up for sale? There has to be an advantage for someone to jump on their device and seek you out. You can post all sorts of fun content, contemporary new home designs, homes of the rich and famous, homes of different peoples (Eskimo’s, cliff dwellers, houseboat users…). The key to social media is entertainment.
Zairmail (www.zairmail.com) is the fastest and easiest way to send (real) postal mail. Give us a call anytime at 888.898.0066, we would be happy to help with your direct mail needs.
