In today’s digital age, online engagement requires a more personal approach than in the past. Online marketing used to be about creating marketing campaigns comprised of ad banners, search terms and mass email sends. Times have changed and with it technologies that hamper those marketing efforts. The amount of people worldwide using ad blockers has increased 41 percent year over year, and emails are opened less frequently as they are increasingly flagged as spam by email providers, or people swipe them into the trash before looking at them.

So how does one go about digital marketing in this new day and age? How do you target a consumer who is engaged digitally, but is ever more immune from digital marketing? We asked those same questions, and our answer was to look to the past and adapt it to the future, with Programmatic Direct Mail®. 

Digital printing for direct mail has been around for a while, but it lacks the timeliness and relevancy that email and ad banners provide. However, at PebblePost we have created a cloud-based software platform that speeds up the time between online data collection and producing of each individual mail piece. How fast is this improved process? If someone does a product search or abandons their shopping cart, we are able to target the consumer with a customized piece of direct mail that enters the mail stream within 12 to 24 hours from that site engagement. 

The main advantage to this digital-to-direct mail approach over a remarketing ad banner or a reminder email is that it’s a more tangible reminder that they visited your site and intended to purchase something. It also shows a higher level of personal service when brands take the time to send a physical piece of personalized mail rather than an automated email response. The platform can personalize that piece of direct mail even further by tagging the site so individual customers will be sent very specific promotions based on what they viewed or actions they have taken. 

We also bring to direct mail some of the advantages of digital marketing by including tools marketers can use to do variable testing and targeting, establish frequency caps, handle list suppression, or set pacing for the budget. This allows marketers to manage their Programmatic Direct Mail® marketing campaigns as quickly and as nimbly as their digital marketing counterparts. Our platform handles everything from campaign management tools to collateral assignment, analytics, and optimization, and our pricing includes production and postage. 

How well does it compare to traditional direct mail and digital marketing? On average, traditional direct mail has a response rate of around 3 percent and digital channels come in well below 1 percent. The personalized direct mail platform has about a 20 percent response rate, and the conversion rate from those responses is around 40 percent, with a total mail conversion rate of 8-10 percent. How does that impact revenue? Current users of the PebblePost platform are seeing a fifteen-fold revenue return on their direct mail spend.

David Cooperstein is a CMO of PebblePost. The company’s Programmatic Direct Mail® platform includes tools for real-time segmentation, workflow, analytics, and optimization and solves the most difficult digital-to-direct remarketing challenges by combining the efficiency of intent data with the effectiveness of direct mail. Follow him on Twitter @minicooper.