Direct Mail Webinar Wrap-Up: Best Practices for Acquisition, Retention & Reactivation

Real-life examples provide some of the best ways to continually improve your direct mail. After all, it’s why Who’s Mailing What! was founded nearly 40 years ago. And it’s why we partnered with our friends at Lob, on two recent webinars in their Modern Marketer’s Best Practices Series. I was honored to participate in both sessions and talk about direct mail acquisition, retention, and reactivation.

If you didn’t have a chance to view either one, here’s a quick rundown of just a few of the many takeaways from each, as well as a link to access full recordings.

The first webinar, Advanced Acquisition Strategies for Intelligent Direct Mail, was hosted by Stephanie Donelson, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Lob. As you might expect, we looked at and talked about several really interesting, high-performing acquisition campaigns from several companies.

Lists, ROI, incentives, A/B testing, calls-to-action, design – we covered a lot of ground.

Here are just two takeaways:

• Test your form factor against another format. One B2B marketer saw a 60% increase in sponsorships by switching from a postcard to a highly personalized letter thanks to Lob’s platform.
• Leverage social proof, like Google ratings, to build trust in your offer and company, as one mailer did.

And Stephanie pointed out that “Marketing is a marathon and not a sprint”. Consistency and patience are needed when using direct mail alone as well as with other channels to achieve long-term success.

For much more, check out the Acquisition Webinar.

The second webinar, Drive Retention & Reactivation Success Using Direct Mail, was hosted by Kim Courvoisier, Director of Content Marketing at Lob.

I’ve long thought of retention as a “leaky bucket” – a challenge a lot of marketers choose not to deal with (or don’t know enough about how to) – so they spend more resources on acquisition. As Courvoisier noted, we should really be “creating those memorable customer journeys and experiences.”

That goes for reactivation, too. The question is: how? Here’re two quick takeaways:

• Target high-value dormant or churned customers. That’s what one company did, using Lob’s platform to drive 20% of conversions and achieve a 263% higher conversion rate with direct mail than email
• Intelligently use data – such as images of a customer’s past purchases – to drive reactivation. A major retailer did just that with an efficiently-produced mail piece.

Those are from 2 of the 3 case studies we discussed. But that wasn’t all.

We also covered personalization, omnichannel, KPIs – and so much more, I can’t talk about it all here.

Want details as well as more ideas? You’ll find them when you check out this recording of the Retention/Reactivation Webinar.