When to use direct and when to use digital

In today’s marketing world you have a dazzling array of options. Do you email customers? Advertise online? Send them postcards? Put up a storefront sign? The unfortunate answer is all of the above!

Successful small business marketers employ a multi-pronged approach that reaches customers across a variety of mediums. People who miss one ad may see another, and those who see both will be doubly influenced.

The problem with many channels however is that with only a few hours each week to focus on marketing, you can’t run them all at once. You have to decide, and it’s often tough to know which one to do when.

Recent research by the Fox School of Business in partnership with the USPS can help shed some light on the solution.

Results show that while digital ads and emails were effective at delivering a focused message that holds the recipient’s attention on a particular piece of an ad, say, a box of text, physical advertisements like postcards were superior at keeping people engaged for longer, for eliciting an emotional reaction, and for helping them remember what they had seen.

In short, print mail elicits emotional reactions that people remember like elephants!

This makes intuitive sense, after all. In this day and age when digital is synonymous with cheap abundance, printed materials denote quality because they appear to take more effort. Customers invest more in businesses that appear to invest in them with bespoke outreach.

This is all despite the fact that with the advent of digital printing technology, the capabilities of both are converging. Personalization (addressing all recipients by first name) is possible in print just as it is in online advertising. Services like targeted postcards can be sent out to address people by first name and triggered “smart” postcards can do interesting things like send themselves to remind people of upcoming appointments.

Print and digital thus have plenty of overlap but the USPS’s research makes it pretty clear when we should be using which.

Use both digital and print in a winning one-two combination, but…

Use digital for:

• Targeted messages to decision-makers
• To deliver newsworthy information like, “Did you know that studies show …?”
• Educating prospects, such as with blogposts

And use print for:

• Inspiring immediate action and quick sales
• Driving home taglines, slogans, vanity phone numbers (1-800- CALL-MIKE), and website URLs through repetition
• Delivering many options and listing out all of your services in the hopes that one will apply

And together, you’ll have yourself an adaptable marketing strategy that gets the right message to the right person at the right time with the desired effect: teach them, attract them, and close more sales!

Look no further to get your first targeted postcard campaign out through the venerable USPS – just log into our web-to-print platform and we’ll take it from there!

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