A long-time staple of email and digital marketing, retargeting campaigns are the perfect way to reel in sales that didn’t happen.
Most marketers are familiar with the digital retargeting playbook, but few know that Direct Mail marketing has also joined the retargeting party. Now you can elevate your retargeting game by reaching consumers with a physical piece of content that drives higher engagement and conversion.
Plus, you get to leverage all the digital retargeting capabilities like programmatic deployment and targeting anonymous (non-logged-in) website visitors.
As you get ready to fire up Direct Mail retargeting campaigns, make sure to consider these 3 critical decisions that can make or break your campaign:
1. Consumer Website Behavior
The first decision you need to make when setting up a retargeting campaign is who to retarget. For these campaigns, custom audiences are not built based on consumer demographics; instead, targeting is determined by website visitors’ actions on your website.
Several targeting parameters can apply to these campaigns, such as the number of pages visited while on-site or where the consumer came from (traffic source).
However, the most important one pertains to how close the consumer was to making a purchase. Did they drop off after adding an item to their cart? Or did they browse and leave?
If you have enough daily site traffic, it might be best to start with an abandoned cart campaign as the return on ad spend should be higher.
That said, no matter which option you choose, make sure the creative and offer consider your consumer’s on-site behavior.
2. To Go Broad or Go Narrow
Once you have settled on the targeting parameters, you must decide what to spotlight on your Direct Mail postcard.
An option is for brands to design one standard creative piece for all their retargeting efforts. The piece generally features evergreen brand creative or focuses on a hero product.
However, there are other alternatives. For brands with different product segments or a wide variety of audiences, tailoring creative to a specific product category might be more efficient. For example, if you sell both men’s and women’s apparel, you would be wise to send a menswear creative piece to the people who visited men’s product pages.
As you can probably imagine, you can go as specific as you would like with your creative. It’s possible to customize Direct Mail pieces for each one of your products and trigger campaigns based on visits to specific product URLs.
However, while that strategy might sound like a great idea, the website visitor receiving the piece can perceive it as invasive. Not to mention that this strategy also requires significant creative and design resources.
It’s probably best to analyze your unique situation and evaluate what makes sense for the consumer shopping for your brand while also considering the amount of site traffic and internal resources.
3. When to Retarget
One of the great things about a Direct Mail retargeting campaign is that it can be integrated into other elements of your customer journey.
We all know that sending an email is free, so it may be best to retarget via email before sending a direct mail piece.
You can easily set up a delay trigger on your Direct Mail retargeting campaign. You first retarget customers via email – within a few hours – of their site visit. Only If they don’t convert, then do you send a direct marketing postcard 2 days later.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to Direct Mail time delays. It’s important to consider how long consumers are in the market before purchasing your product and what other retargeting efforts you have going on.
While you want to make sure you don’t miss the purchase window, you do have the ability to synchronize the retargeted Direct Mail campaign with your other marketing efforts to maximize your response rate.
