That’s a question that many marketers ask themselves. Direct mail is often seen as being too expensive. It’s also seen as something that just ends up in the trash anyway, so it’s not worth the investment.

The reality is that direct mail is still alive and well. Direct marketing has seen a rise in response rates as high as 5%, beating out email campaigns.

It’s not too late to jump on the direct mail bandwagon. Read on to learn the top direct mail trends in 2019 so you can set your marketing up for success.

1. Integrated Marketing Campaigns

The same way that social media interacts with SEO, direct mail advertising interacts with other forms of marketing.

When someone gets a direct mail piece, they’ll put it to the side to look at later. They’ll then check out the company online by visiting their website.

You can integrate digital marketing strategies like blogging, email marketing, and retargeting ads with direct mail to make all of your campaigns more effective.

2. Personalization Rules

When you look at direct mail trends, this one may seem most likely to be a digital marketing trend. Personalization applies to direct mail, too.

Personalization across all marketing channels has been shown to increase loyalty and spending with your company. It’s that important.

You can personalize direct mail by using the person’s name and create messages around their specific needs. The more it seems like you’re addressing their specific issues, the more likely they are to purchase from you.

3. Design Still Matters

Your design has a huge impact on your entire campaign. It impacts the direct mail advertising cost, and it has a huge impact on whether or not people will stop to read the direct mail piece or ignore it.

For your design to have maximum impact, keep it as simple as possible. You can do that by incorporating a lot of whitespace in your design with few images. Whitespace draws the eye to the images, which gets the reader’s attention.

If you use images that make them curious about your piece, they’ll read the text because they want to know more. They’ll see your messages and feel like it’s written just for them.

You close your design with a call to action. This tells the reader with the next steps they need to take, such as call for a free consultation.

Top Direct Mail Trends for 2019

Direct mail should not be written off by marketers. It should be embraced now more than ever as people are getting bombarded by digital ads. Direct mail can help you stand out in all of that noise.

These direct mail trends show that it’s possible to create a strong campaign by combining different marketing tactics, personalizing content, and having a strong direct mail design.

They’ll be likely to visit your website, where you can turn them into customers. For more about that, check out how you can turn clicks into customers in 5 steps.

This is also why email marketing was and still is an important strategy for every business. It’s great at converting leads into consumers, and it’s a great way to reach consumers right where they are looking.

If you’re not convinced about the importance of email marketing, keep on reading. Learn to get better at it, too, and see your conversions shot up.

The Importance of Email Marketing and Why You Need It

Marketers are turning their attention to SEO, SMM, and other ways to reach consumers. Does that mean, however, that email marketing is now obsolete?

On the contrary, it’s still going strong as it has unique advantages. See below what it can do for your business.

1. Email is the Preferred Communication Channel

Did you know that 77% of people getting marketing messages through email? This means they’re less likely to ignore an email from you versus an ad on social media, for example. For this reason, email conversion rates are at least 3 times higher than that of social media posts.

2. It Increases Brand Awareness

Each time you appear on their inbox, you increase the customer’s awareness of you even if they don’t click that email. You stay on top of their minds, and if you pair your efforts with a catchy subject and valuable content, you build value and relationship with the customer over time.

Don’t worry if they don’t buy or use a service at once. With a constant stream of valuable emails from you, your leads will turn into loyal customers in no time.

3. It’s a Cost-Effective Strategy

What’s great about email marketing is that you don’t need much to start your campaign. All you need are quality content, a great subject, and good graphics to attract customers. Even though you’ll need to pay for a person to do these things, it’s still cheaper than having to pay for ad space on Google or Facebook, printing posters and flyers, and mail delivery fees.

Because of the low costs, its return on investment is quite attractive. In general, businesses get back as much as $38 for every dollar they spend on email marketing.

4. It Provides Precise Metrics

To know whether your campaign is working or not, you have to look at the metrics. You’ll have to see what has changed for the better and what hasn’t. In email marketing, in particular, you’ll have to look at the visits through email, click-through rate, conversions, open rates, and unsubscribe rates.

The good news is that these are pretty easy to track. This is unlike other strategies that only provide estimated data, hence estimated results. You can then use the data you get from your campaign to learn your customers’ likes, dislikes, and behavior.

Best Practices for Email Marketing

Now that you why email marketing is important for your business, it’s time to get started. Here are the email campaigns best practices.

1. Grow Your Email List

The first step is to build an email list with leads who want to hear from you. Some businesses buy a list to make this step shorter, but this isn’t recommended. Your email provider can penalize you for this and you won’t build a valuable relationship this way.

You can get email address using 2 reputable ways, both of which are free. One is offering an attractive and valuable lead magnet, such as an ebook, report, checklist, and such, in exchange for their email address. Another is by having them fill up an opt-in form.

Then, make sure to keep your email list fresh by removing inactive subscribers once in a while. You may also use a Bulk Email Verifier to clean email addresses.

2. Personalize Your Emails Using Segmentation

There’s no email that’s perfect for everybody, yet it’s too time-consuming to personalize each email. One way to target specific people is to use segmentation, in which you break down your list into groups. This allows you to send a personalized email related to them in one way or another.

You can divide them according to age, location, occupation, gender, interests, and other segments you can think of. You can even send different emails according to their activity or inactivity.

3. Time Your Emails

Even if you have an attention-grabbing subject line paired with well-written content and a clear CTA, none of this will matter if the timing is wrong. At certain times of the day, your subscribers may be too busy to open a marketing email. Your email may be too early or too late for your email list, too, which will push it further down the inbox.

How do you know what day and what time to send an email? There’s only one way to find out, and that is to test by sending out the same email at different times of the day. After which, you can gather and study the data to see the optimum time for your subscribers to read your email.

4. Talk to One Person

When you send out an email, you send it out to a large group of people, but you don’t need to make it seem that way. When writing out an email copy, write as if you’re talking to only one person. Address the recipient by name, which is now possible using a handful of tools.

For this to work, you have to know and understand your buyer persona. This allows you to send an email that speaks to them on a more personal level, building trust and increasing your conversion rate.

Use Email Marketing in Tandem with Other Campaigns

While the importance of email marketing is evident, you shouldn’t stick to only it and disregard other marketing strategies.

Not sure which ones to rely on? Uncertain which ones suit your business?

We’ve got you covered! Feel free to read our guide today. Keep up with the ever-changing trends and make sure to keep yourself updated with the latest digital marketing ideas here.