The benefits of direct mail marketing are clear. You’ve probably seen the stats about consumer behavior—77% of people sort through their physical mail as soon as they get it. Not to mention, almost all Americans check their mail every day. A high percentage of people also feel that physical mail is more personal, leaving an immediate and lasting impression as a result.

The big challenge, however, is that direct mail can be unwieldy to manage at scale. For many companies, mail-based outreach requires endless spreadsheets, hours of manual labor, and a high risk of wasted effort. You may not be able to see who’s receiving your messages and whether your audiences are taking action on your information.

It’s this pain point that users can address by using Lob and Towerdata. Towerdata is a data-as-a-service (DaaS) provider with 600 million records. In a nutshell, marketers can use this information to improve segmentation, create cross-channel optimizations, and develop comprehensive customer pictures.

1. Use an API to Automate Processes and Save Time in Your Direct Mail Strategy

If you’re using spreadsheets and manual process to manage your direct mail strategy, it’s time to make a change. Using a piece of technology called an API, you can automate tasks that would otherwise be redundant. If you’re familiar with these concepts, you can skip the rest of this section. Otherwise, here are three resources to help bring you up to speed:

• How Automation Makes Direct Mail Better. This guide is an introduction to direct mail automation, explaining how APIs work.
• Automating Your Direct Mail Program? Know these 8 Technical Concepts. This short blog post will walk you through the technical jargon that you need to know.
• How Marketers Can Build a Direct Mail Growth Engine. This resource will show you how to integrate direct mail into your marketing stack.

An API can help you be more creative in your campaign strategy, allowing you to use data at scale.

2. Use Tower Data + Lob to Reach Out to Your Email Subscribers by Mail

Let’s say that you have an email list but no addresses, but want to reach out to your prospects and customers over email. You could use the TowerData + Lob integration to look up physical addresses based on email records in your CRM.

Using Lob’s API, you can manage a postcard based campaign with the simplicity of email. Techniques to try include the following:

• A/B Testing
• Conversation Rate Optimization
• Segmentation
• Tracking

You can think of direct mail as an extension for your digital campaigns. Using data from TowerData with Lob’s API, you can manage and optimize campaigns at scale.

3. Re-engage Old Leads

Let’s say that you’ve built up an email list of past customers and subscribers, and you’d like to re-engage them. You could always send a quick email—but given how busy people are, that outreach is at high-risk of going unnoticed.

Instead, you can use the TowerData and Lob integration to look up records of people in your CRM. Figure out who seems interested in your company. Send a physical postcard with an incentive such as a freebie or a promotion code to redeem online.

With Lob and TowerData, you can create a trigger-based campaign experience, just as you would with your email marketing software. There won’t be any manual effort necessary. TowerData will validate your email list by cross-checking it against multiple data sources including credit card companies and other third-party data providers. In other words, the information you get comes with a sanity check and is ready for use.

4. Improve the Precision of Your Outreach

TowerData has a wealth of information about the 600 million records in its database. In addition to matching physical addresses to email records in your CRM, you can also gain access to demographic, purchase, and interest-based data in real-time, through an API.

With this information, it becomes possible to create more effective customer pictures. Tailor your messages to your audiences so that they’re more likely to take action. Whether you’re sending cold-mailing your recipients or re-engaging past customers, make sure that your value-proposition is spot-on.

Let’s say that you’re a marketer at a ticketing company, for instance. The majority of your transactions might be taking place over email, now that tickets are no longer delivered to the home.

But it still might make sense to reach out to your audiences over physical mail, especially if you’re looking to send a promotion (like an invitation to a local event). Well-designed graphics, high-quality photography, and thoughtful postcards can make a big difference in terms of the first impression that you create.

The Bottom Line

Don’t try to boil the ocean. Over the long-term, your goal might be to build personalization strategies and omnichannel campaigns. You’ll want to make sure that you always have the right messaging for your key customer segments. These are big goals to pursue: take smaller steps to reaching your goals. Automation can help you free up brainpower to get creative with your direct mail marketing strategy. With the Lob + TowerData integration, you can have the same targeting precision as email.

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