Direct Mail – Here Today - Gone Tomorrow?

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I don’t know about you, but I found 2012 to be a year of great experimentation regarding how we communicate with our marketplace. Growing our top and bottom lines has never been easy, but the more complex our marketing activities become, the more people and resource we have to throw at it. It gets harder and more expensive to get a reasonable return on our marketing investment.

This year has seen us fully integrate Social Media, cross channel communications with on-line and offline media, as well as implement new technologies and creative tools trying to increase the impact of our communications with constituency in order to grow our businesses.

Granted, we have opened up many new doorways to talk to our customers and prospects, but has all of that work yielded incremental top and bottom line growth for you or your clients? Is there a real ROI?

We are all chasing the Holy Grail hoping to get a leg up on the competition and again, I ask if we are really accomplishing that? When other industry participants implement these new technologies what choice do we have but to follow suite? We can’t miss the opportunity to get our share of the prize, can we?

To tell you the truth, I don’t have the answers to those questions, I wish I did, but, there is one thing I do know, all of the changes within our industry have not altered the basic fact that our customers and prospects want to be reached, recognized and understood. One tool that accomplishes this goal, never goes out of style and that consistently performs well is direct mail.

Direct mail that follows the core direct marketing tenants to create highly personalized, relevant and timely messaging has been and will continue to be the basic blocking and tackling tool of the industry.

When all else fails, we can count on direct mail to come through for us.

The effective use of internal and external data, has allowed us to greatly reduce waste and cost through precision targeting. Reaching just those that will truly benefit from our messaging has become a standard skill. Today’s small production runs are becoming just as cost efficient as yesterday’s million-piece jobs and believe me, this will only get better in the future.

In the end, this is a time of challenges, frustrations and new competition. We will continue to see innovation, new channels, and more ways to communicate with our constituencies. As Patrick Brand, President, Pitney Bowes, North America Mailing said in a recent post, “If the actions of market leaders are any indication, this is an exciting time to be in the print and mail industry. Even as we have seen an explosion of digital media—from email and Web, to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter—the unique attributes of direct mail stand apart. Today’s direct mail pioneers are embracing the data-driven, digital capabilities of the online world to deliver a stronger connection on paper that is more dynamic, more welcoming, and more personal. Direct mail will thrive.”

Bottom line? Yes, we can continue to count on direct mail. I believe this channel will be with us for a long time. As direct mail specialists, AccuLink has a 32 year history of producing results in the direct mail arena. Please give me a call to discuss some of the unique solutions we offer to improve direct mail results.

Ed Glaser
Chief Marketing Officer
252.321.5805
ed.glaser@acculink.com
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