Alex Barca
Director of Demand Generation
Direct mail and in-person advertising are some of the oldest and most effective marketing strategies in the book. Flyers, magazines, and various inserts have been showing up on doorsteps for decades as a way to increase brand awareness, engage with prospects, and drive sales. The open rate of direct mail is commonly between 80-100% while email lags around 20-30%.
Historically, deriving attribution from a direct mail piece has been virtually impossible. A lot of assumptions had to come into play. Not to mention, integrating the offline channel into a digital ABM approach using automation has been nonexistent.
Marketers who succeed in 2022 and beyond will have to grow out of their digital nutshell to scale memorable experiences at the top of the sales funnel.
The objective
At Postal, we recently ran a postcard campaign with the goal of driving leads and meetings from direct mail pieces by using a QR code to track attribution. Not only were we able to measure results, but found this campaign to be extremely cost-effective, with less than $100 per lead. In comparison to digital tactics such as paid search and display, this is far cheaper. We now plan to send these postcards on a quarterly basis to compliment our digital paid advertising strategy.
Using Offline Marketing Automation, it’s never been easier to integrate the combination of online and in-person touchpoints to stay top of mind with leads.
The play
This play had several key parts:
- The target list: We chose to target ~1500 contacts that we had addresses for in our database. These folks redeemed a gift from us in the past, but never engaged with our sales team. They were high-quality leads within our ICP but had simply not converted yet.
- The messaging/design: Since it was springtime, we decided to go with the theme of growth. On the front of the card we asked the prospects, “Growth goals got you stressed?,” then offered Offline Marketing Automation as a solution to hit their goals.
- The QR code destination/offer: The card had a QR code that said if the recipient scanned it, they’d receive a new plant pal (playing into the growth theme) if they took a trial of Postal. The QR code brought them to a custom trial page and if they filled it out, an automated email was sent with a link to redeem an aloe plant. Then our sales team promptly followed up to start a trial.
- The follow-up: We knew that not all 1500 recipients would scan the QR code, but we didn’t want to waste all those impressions. Using Postal, we were able to see when the postcards were delivered. We then had our SDR team follow up with those who did not scan the card to ask if they were interested in a trial.
The impact
The results, frankly, blew us away. We spent a total of $2,700 on the campaign, including postcards and aloe plants. This resulted in:
- 370 scans of the QR code
- 25 trial form fills
- 10 form fills converted into quality opportunities for the sales team
- 5 more quality opportunities created from targeted SDR followup
- 4 closed-won deals resulting in $50k+ bookings
The campaign achieved a 17.5x ROI and a $108 cost per lead.
The takeaway
As a demand generation leader in a constantly changing economic climate, ensuring I’m putting my program dollars to good use is always top of mind. This campaign proves that I can spend my dollars in the offline channel and get an extremely positive return. This will help inform my tactical mix as we head into the back half of the year.
If I could change anything in the campaign, I would have tried to take even more of an omnichannel approach and targeted these same contacts with display ads to ensure they were surrounded by both online and offline touches before the SDRs reached out. I believe this would have increased the lift on the number of meetings booked in the SDR followup phase of the campaign.
Before investing in your next offline campaign, be sure to plug your plan into our ROI calculator to ensure you’re maximizing your marketing dollars.
