What Can Direct Mail Learn from Email?

Doing some reading and research, recently, we found this list from Digital Marketer, showcasing the best and worst email subject lines they had seen over their years of experience. The full list is worth reading, but what stood out to us were a few of the topics they believe are necessary elements of any successful email campaign. Here are three of the eight elements they suggest:

1 – Self-Interest
These are your bread and butter subject lines – you should be using them most frequently.
They are usually direct and speak to a specific benefit your audience will gain by opening the email. Self-interest subject lines also help pre-qualify openers by giving them a clue about your email’s body content.

2 – Curiosity
If self-interest subject lines work because they communicate a direct benefit of opening the email, curiosity-based ones succeed for the exact opposite reason. These peak the interest of subscribers without giving away too much information, leading to higher opens. Be careful though, because curiosity-based subject lines can get old fast and are the most likely to miss their mark.

3 – Offer
Do you like free stuff?  Do you like to buy things?
So does your email list. When you are giving something away or selling something your subscribers would be interested in, directly stating that in your subject line is a great way to convince them to open the email and learn more.

Notice anything?

These same topics and talking points would be just as at-home in a direct mail piece as they are in email. Really, what it comes down to is simple human nature. As much as some of us may not want to admit it, people are typically pretty predictable. By grabbing a consumer's interest with an eye-catching package, envelope, or postcard, you can dramatically improve the success of whatever piece of marketing that package is holding.

Simply sticking a coupon into a plain white envelope is not enough (except when it's exactly what's called for), and smart marketers and business owners are taking the extra time to develop more complex and interesting ways to deliver their marketing materials to their customers.

For the latest advances in print marketing, and information on how to take your mail pieces to the next level, contact us at 866.872.9249 or at info@trayinc.com

Four Reasons Why Direct Mail is Still the Undefeated Hero

Some people are under the impression that direct mail is last year’s marketing plan.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Direct mail is practically the class and quintessential modern marketing plan (and integrating social media and digital marketing only makes a marketing plan exponentially better).

In this post, we will examine exactly why direct mail is so powerful and still so relevant.

Direct mail has shelf-life

Not all advertising mail is discarded and thrown away. Coupons, special promotions, and “save the date” mailings are often placed on the refrigerator or coffee table to be used in the near future.

We can’t send tracking devices with each individual mailing to know and understand exactly what happens to it once it lands in a prospective client’s mailbox, but it is common for these people to arrive, mailing in hand, and ready to make a purchase.

Monitor direct mail response

Coupons are an excellent way of knowing if your direct mail campaign is working.

As you already probably aware, a unique call to action on the mailing can be directly linked to its mailing campaign. Source codes and priority codes are effective ways to see which lists are providing the best responses.

One of the most effective ways of measuring a direct mail campaign’s success is by looking at the bottom line – when business increases there is a way to know the direct mail campaign is working.

Deliver consumers to your website and Facebook page

Some skeptics today say that the internet will eventually phase out direct mail. In the past, we have already discussed why direct mail and social media are not just not enemies, but that they actually complement each other in highly successful ways.

Of course, people do go online to find the information they are looking for.

Websites and Facebook pages have largely become the “store front” for many businesses by giving access to consumers about everything from store hours to store inventory. However, there has to be a reason for someone to visit your website, and direct mail can be the catalyst that sends them there.

Effective advertising

On the first day of marketing school you learned this tip: Anything you can do to keep your name in front of your customers is important to retention of those customers.

Whether a business is just starting off building brand name awareness or they are reminding existing clients that they are ready to serve them, direct mail campaigns makes it happen

Compared to radio, television or newsprint, direct mail is still the best value in advertising.

When are you going to start your next direct mail campaign?

From social to print, we are going to take you places. Contact us to get started today.

Accomplishing Effective and Successful Email Marketing Plans

If you’ve seen our Facebook page lately, you know we’ve been sharing articles on the popularity and importance of email marketing – and how to do it right.

This blog post will serve to help those of you who are excited about this marketing strategy but from a unique angle: let’s take a look at some of the mistakes we can make as email marketers so we know to avoid them in the future.

Without any further ado, what are some mistakes you can make in your email marketing plans?

Just do the following:

Be too focused on incremental tactics 

Sure you can tweak the subject lines all you want, but it won't improve your overall program. Focus most of your time on the big support efforts that will drive major revenue growth. It sounds obvious once we verbalize it, but remember: Taking care of the big things should always be done before the small thing.

Forget to integrate

Remember our blog post about integrating social with print?

Good, because the same is true with email marketing. Email drives subscribers to visit your website, visit your stores, phone your call center, and engage with your social media pages. It also pulls in web and mobile behavior, consumer reviews, catalog assets, and so much more.

Don’t test your tactics

What should you really be doing? Rather than organizing testing as an alternating tactic, use it as a strategic process. Take a progressive approach by testing types of variables that you can leverage and build on for successive testing. But if you want your plan to fail, of course you won’t do this.

Miss the easy stuff 

This is a big one. There are a lot of great avenues to go down, but if you’re looking to have an ineffective campaign, then definitely forget where they are.

See, a "Happy Birthday" email is would have been great and yet too many B2C marketers don't send these messages. "We don't have subscribers' birth dates" is a common excuse. Our solution? Start capturing them. Get a program that helps you capture them so you can start generating revenue.

Avoid the big picture 

Jump straight into redoing your email templates with a responsive design even though your website is not mobile friendly, especially if most of your conversions are happening on desktops, and you ignore the fact that mobile is really about context and content.

From social to print, we are going to take you places. Contact us to get started today.

The Tray Way: Integrated Marketing Keeps Your Customers in Contact

Integrated marketing is something that we have spoken about a number of times in the past, and it is one of the most important concepts to keep in mind when marketing any brand. One key part of integrated marketing is maintaining communication with your customers. Marketing is not a one-way street, and if consumers have no easy way of responding to a direct mail piece, you may be missing out on valuable feedback and opportunities.

For a good example of how important this simple step can be, see this story from the MarketingWeek.co.uk blog. Contributor Lucy Handley is a marketing analyst, but she is also a consumer. Her work landed her on the mailing lists of a large number of companies, and when the mail marketing started coming in, she decided to explore how easy it was to respond to those companies.

The brands include Volkswagen, Visit Scotland, children’s retailer Great Little Trading Company, the League Managers’ Association and gifts website Not on the High Street…Unwanted emails I can easily delete, send to junk mail or unsubscribe to. But post, especially if it is totally irrelevant, is so much more intrusive and much more of a waste. This time however, I’m not chucking it away, I’m emailing these brands to get them to take me off their mailing lists.

When marketers are spending so much time focused on keeping a consistent brand from print, to social, to websites, it can be easy to forget details like email addresses. Make sure that your customers can respond to your direct mail in a number of ways, and that those methods are consistently checked, watched, and responded to. A rapid response time can help build trust with your customers, and can give you a second chance to win a sale that might have been teetering on the edge.

When trying to get in touch with Volkswagon, however, Handley found that her experience was far from that model.

…the highest profile of those brands, VW, performs much less well. But I must come clean: its dealership mailing was an MOT offer and was actually sent to my late father rather than me. This is surprising, given that two years ago, I had to go into the dealership to tell them, in person, that he had passed away. So I found the dealership online and emailed the relevant contact. Whose email then bounced back. So I emailed the manager, who has not replied. I also emailed via the VW brand website and have had no acknowledgement.

Ultimately, Volkswagon's poor response options left Handley without an easy solution to her complaint. If the mailer had directed her immediately to a different person, the company would have had the opportunity to respond with an apology, an offer, or a method of furthering their communication.

As Handley points out, direct mail doesn't come with an 'unsubscribe' button. There isn't an HTML form on your postcard asking the consumer why they turned down your offer. If you want to make the most of print marketing, make sure that you give consumers an easy way to stay in contact.

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The Tray PML Way is the blog for Tray, experts in the printing, mailing, logistics and promotional products. You can learn more about our organization's capabilities by visiting our website, as well as our Facebook and Twitter pages.