As research continually demonstrates, accurate audience targeting is one of the most crucial elements in marketing. When you can reach the right people with the right message, engagement levels increase significantly, leading to better conversion rates. However, the challenge you face is sourcing permission data that provides deep insights into your audience's habits, preferences, and behaviour.
This is where direct mail steps in.
According to the 2024 Direct Mail Marketing Benchmark Report, effective audience targeting is now recognised as the top advantage of direct mail among B2B and B2C marketers. This marks a notable rise from its fourth-place position in the 2023 survey. This jump reflects a growing recognition of direct mail and offline data as powerful tools for prospecting and reaching potential customers. This shift comes when digital targeting methods are increasingly scrutinised due to data privacy concerns.
Targeted precision leads to profitable growth
Direct mail stands out when it comes to precise audience targeting. You can build highly accurate audience models using high-quality permission data sources, allowing you to pinpoint and reach prospects who resemble your best customers. By leveraging detailed, individual-level transactional and intent data, you can create predictive models that are incredibly accurate. As new data sources emerge and variables evolve, you can scale your campaigns and continuously discover high-potential audiences.
These hyper-targeted campaigns often deliver a higher return on investment than today's most popular digital channels.
But here's an interesting twist: the audiences you reach through direct mail can also be brought into digital environments.
Expanding digital reach and campaign effectiveness with offline data
Third-party cookies have long been essential for effective digital campaigns. Although Google has recently suggested that the future may not be entirely cookieless, the industry is still searching for alternative solutions. Identity resolution and conversion tracking have become more challenging, leading to lower conversion rates and higher customer acquisition costs in digital marketing.
In response to these challenges, digital marketers have started exploring various solutions, including offline data from direct mail. You can deliver relevant ads across digital platforms without relying on third-party cookies by linking offline audiences to online identities through a deterministic identity graph. This approach allows you to reach a clearly defined audience, enhancing the effectiveness of your digital campaigns.
Accurately measuring campaign performance
Another significant shift noted in the marketer data from 2023 to 2024 was the rise of “easy-to-track attribution and performance metrics,” which moved from the fifth position to the second most crucial advantage of direct mail.
Just as with direct mail, when you onboard audience lists into digital environments, you can accurately attribute specific actions or purchases back to a targeted individual. This prospecting strategy improves your ability to measure campaign performance, helps eliminate wasted impressions, and reduces concerns about programmatic ad fraud.
A striking nine out of ten marketers agree that integrating direct mail with digital marketing strategies positively impacts campaign performance. You can enhance audience targeting and boost campaign performance across all direct response channels by leveraging direct mail's proven offline models. As the marketing landscape evolves, consider using direct mail's strengths in this new digital marketing era to achieve even better results.
