Open your work inbox on a weekday morning and look at what came in overnight. Sale notices, webinar invites, a newsletter you don’t remember signing up for. Now walk out to the mailbox. A few envelopes, a catalog, maybe a postcard. You’ll carry all of it inside and look at each piece long enough to decide where it goes.
Email has been around for decades and it still earns its spot in the plan. So does the mailbox. The trouble is that most companies run them as two programs with two calendars and two sets of creative. Email and direct mail do more when you plan them as one campaign.
What each channel is good and bad at
Email is fast and cheap. You can write it this morning, send it this afternoon and see who clicked by tomorrow. It can also be deleted in a second, sorted into a tab nobody checks, or buried under whatever arrived after it.
Mail runs the other way. It takes longer to produce and deliver, and every piece costs you paper, press time and postage. But somebody has to pick it up. It sits on a desk or a kitchen counter for days, and other people walk past it.
So each one covers for the other. Email gets there quickly and makes it easy to respond. Mail gets noticed and sticks around.
Start with one list
If marketing keeps the email list and somebody in sales or accounting keeps the mailing list, you probably have two different audiences and don’t know it. Fix that before you design anything.
Match the two files so each person has one record, with a postal address and an email address where you have both. Clear out the duplicates, the people who moved and the contacts who left the company. With a clean, matched list you can decide person by person who gets email only, who gets mail and who gets both. You also stop paying postage on addresses that went bad two years ago.
Before you hand a list over for mailing, ask your printer how they want the file set up and what address checks they can run on it.
Time each touch so it sets up the next
A simple pattern works for most campaigns.
- Send an email that says something is coming. Keep it short and tell people to watch their mailbox. A piece that’s expected gets more than a glance when it shows up.
- Mail the piece. This is where the full offer goes. You have room for it, and you have the reader’s attention.
- Send a follow-up email once the piece has had time to arrive. It reaches people while the mailer is still on the desk, and it puts the response one click away.
Your mailer can tell you the day the pieces go into the mail. Build the email schedule around that date and leave some slack on the follow-up, since delivery isn’t something you control.
One offer, one look, one way to respond
The second touch should feel like a reminder of the first. Use the same headline, the same photo, the same offer and the same deadline in the inbox and on the printed piece. When the email says one thing and the postcard says another, people read them as two unrelated pitches.
Give both a single place to land. Put a link in the email and a QR code on the mail piece, and point them at the same landing page. Whichever one a reader picks up, they end up in the same spot, and you get to count the responses in one place.
Mail can be as personal as email, too. With variable data printing on our digital press, each piece can carry the recipient’s name or a different offer for a different segment. That way the printed piece lines up with what that person saw in their inbox.
Decide who is worth the postage
Everybody on the list can get the emails. Not everybody needs the mail piece. Save it for the people where a response is worth what the piece costs:
- Your best customers
- Customers who haven’t bought in a while
- People who never open your email
That last group is easy to forget. If someone hasn’t opened an email from you in a year, another email won’t change that. A piece in their mailbox might.
Try it on your next campaign
Pick one email campaign that’s already on your calendar. Choose its best segment and add a mail piece with the same offer, the same look and the same landing page. Then compare how that segment responds against everyone who only got the email.
We’re an independently owned commercial printer in Fenton, Missouri, and we print the piece and mail it from the same building. We don’t sub it out. Call (636) 343-1167 or request a quote and tell us what you’re sending.
