Delivering Impact: Direct Mail and Brand Awareness

Didit Editorial

4 years ago

In our last blog post, we discussed the latest digital technologies proven to boost response, facilitate tracking, and get you the most from your direct mail campaigns. Today, we’re back to explore one of the most fundamental marketing strategies behind the direct mail experience: using the platform to build brand awareness, generate leads, and grow your business.

As a brand, direct mail gives you a strategic advantage influencing the primary goal of any marketing campaign: to have consumers think about your brand when thinking about a product or service. Successful branding encourages prospects to explore your offering before checking out the competition—which is just one of the many reasons 77% of marketers connect brand awareness to their growth plans.

How strong is your brand?

Every business wants a strong brand. But what gives a brand strength? It starts with the basics— including knowing your target audience well enough to hit them with the right message at the right time. Strong brands know to focus less on direct sales and more on the longer-term goals including educating prospects, telling personal stories, and endearing the brand to a specific audience.

The strongest brands earn recognition from potential customers who associate the name with a specific industry, product, or service. And the best brands earn names that become synonymous with a product category or industry. (Think Kleenex, Xerox, Google, and Band Aid).

The benefits of brand awareness.

The benefits to building a strong brand are plentiful and include standing out from competitors, building trust, lowering cost per acquisition, closing more sales, and growing market share. Deliver the right brand voice, positioning, and exposure and your brand can become the first that comes to mind when a prospect thinks about your industry, service, or product.

The perfect channel for your brand.

Whether your goal is to nurture leads, stay top of mind, create brand advocates, launch new products or services, or differentiate your business from competitors, direct mail is the perfect channel to build brand awareness.

Success starts with science.

Science proves direct mail creates more emotional processing than other channels and mediums, including improved memory and brand association. Opening a letter—and holding it in your hands—creates a sensation few digital touchpoints can match.

Tactile and personal, direct mail hits when, where, and how consumers want it, creating stronger brand recall than digital ads. When consumers use their senses to interact with media—in a comfortable place like a home or office—the marketing and brand messages make a stronger impression.

Bring your brand story to life.

Direct mail also increases the power of storytelling. Humans connect with stories and feel closer to brands that share them. Visible and tangible, direct mail feels more visceral and real. Deliver your mailer in the form of a personal letter and the message feels more compelling. And images designed to reinforce the words bring your brand story to life.

Bypass the distracted user.

Direct mail also trumps other channels and mediums known to create a distracted experience for consumers.

Targeting and exposing ads to users in the digital space opens doors for multitasking, decreasing impact for users who are browsing their smartphones while watching TV, checking their email while sitting in traffic, or listening to a radio script while merging into the highway.

Direct mail works together with the ritual of reading the mail as a consumers walks through the door at the end of the day. And that means recipients are locked-in and paying attention.

Deliver a more intimate experience.

Consumers open emails and view Facebook ads more as a reflex than the result of a mindful decision. The decision to open a direct mail piece is more active and conscious. The commitment to open a letter is small but hardly unmeaningful. It’s more intimate and gives your brand a better chance to connect. Most consumers will at least give your direct mail piece a scan, which – as a general rule — is more than you can expect from digital marketing. The rest is a matter of keeping their attention.

Connect on a more personal level.

Direct mail is also a more personal medium. As a brand, you can address recipients by name and even use technology to inject a note of personalization that captures and keeps more attention establishes more initial trust, and grows more organic brand awareness than more informal channels can provide

More science behind your brand.

Science returns in the form of eye-tracking and brain imaging technology to further prove the superior impact of direct mail. Easier for the brain to process and remember, direct mail requires 21% less thought to understand and process. Humans also digest direct mail messages more quickly than in digital marketing channels, which gives you an edge to get your message across.