Modernize direct mail with AI & automation. Get our guide to drive remarkable results with Lob's expertise.
For marketing leaders juggling multiple vendors and struggling to prove direct mail ROI, AI automation changes everything. One platform handles creation through delivery, with real-time analytics that make it easy to show impact alongside your digital channels.
AI is transforming how marketers think about direct mail — and for good reason. In this guide, we'll show you exactly how automation and AI can supercharge your campaigns with smarter targeting, better personalization, and results you can actually measure. By leveraging automation and AI, you can quickly generate content, enhance personalization, improve targeting and testing, automate processes, improve efficiency, and gain real-time analytics for optimizing campaign performance.
The guide was proudly created by humans and AI working together.
Here's what AI actually does for marketers: it spots patterns in your customer data that humans might miss, then uses those insights to help you make smarter decisions about who to target and what to say.
Recommended reading: Should I use AI to write my direct mail marketing copy?
By incorporating AI into direct mail campaigns, you can increase efficiency by generating multiple versions of copy, images, and calls to action to use and test. You can also enhance the relevance and impact of your messages with increased abilities to personalize and customize elements of your campaign. AI algorithms can analyze customer data, preferences, and behaviors to generate personalized content, identify target audience segments, automate campaign processes, and optimize performance through real-time analytics.
The benefits of AI in direct mail are pretty compelling — from generating multiple copy variations in seconds to identifying your highest-value audience segments automatically.
Automating various aspects of direct mail campaigns saves you time and effort. Picture this: launching a direct mail campaign in the time it takes to send an email. That's the power of automation — turning what used to take weeks into something you can do in minutes. Direct mail automation and AI abilities can include content generation, campaign creation, defining your audience and segments, printing, fulfillment, sending, tracking, and performance evaluation. Additionally, AI can help maximize ROI by ensuring the optimal audience, creative, form factor, colors, and copy are used.
As a first phase, imagine interacting with a chatbot and asking for help or recommendations that shape your direct mail strategy. Through advanced AI, we combine user-friendly automation with the power of data-driven insights, so your campaigns run smarter than ever and put Lob at the forefront of innovation.
By reducing manual tasks, automation and AI enable you to focus on strategy, creativity, and campaign optimization.
We automated everything—from ensuring members were providing deliverable addresses to programmatically sending direct mail pieces on demand. - Denise Remhof, Product Manager, Couchsurfing
AI-powered audience insights allow you to identify specific target audience segments accurately. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, you can uncover patterns, behaviors, and characteristics that define your most valuable customers and entirely new customers that match your target demographic and maximize your direct mail ROI. This knowledge empowers you to create more targeted and relevant direct mail campaigns that generate higher conversion rates.
Our goal is to ensure that we're reaching the right people with the right message at the right time, and intelligent direct mail does just that. - Senior Marketing Manager, Healthcare company
Creating direct mail that converts can be challenging, even for a seasoned direct mail pro. Lob allows you to be more efficient with your mail pieces by sending fewer mail pieces in more targeted campaigns that reach and convert segments of your audience, resulting in higher conversion rates and ROI.
Bonus material: The Modern Marketer's Guide to Crush ROI & Budget Goals with Direct Mai
AI analyzes your customer data to create personalized content for each recipient — going way beyond basic name personalization to deliver messages that actually connect.
Personalized direct mail has been proven to increase response rates, customer engagement, and overall campaign effectiveness. 55% of consumers expect mail pieces to be personalized to them, and 68% of consumers are more likely to engage with a personalized direct mail piece.
Automation platforms further enable you to use advanced personalization tactics, including 1:1 QR codes, barcodes, and maps, personalizing far beyond the Dear {First Name} options offered by many printers and more basic direct mail platforms.
Recommended resource: The Modern Marketer's Guide to Personalization
You can use AI to help create copy options and variations for direct mail pieces and test which copy results in the best response, conversion, and ROI. Being able to do this efficiently and at scale enables you to go beyond A/B split tests to conduct full-fledged multivariate tests and analyses. The benefit is you learn what works and what doesn't much more quickly than standard A/B split testing.
Automation and AI platforms like Lob have expansive print delivery networks and apply modern technology to streamline operations so that you can execute direct mail at any scale or frequency. Lob uses address verification technology before you send your campaigns to ensure that your addresses are deliverable and everything you send arrives at the right place, at the right time—every time. This reduces waste and maximizes the ROI of every campaign dollar.
Automation and AI tools provide real-time analytics to help you track, analyze, and optimize direct mail campaign performance. These tools enable you to measure and manage direct mail with integrated, enterprise-strength analytics. Integrations with popular marketing automation tools allow easier attribution methods. You can seamlessly track conversions through personalized URLs and QR codes, and you can see where in the mail stream each of your mail pieces at any point and time.
You can monitor delivery, response rates, conversions, and other key metrics and make data-driven decisions to improve future campaigns and maximize ROI.
Recommended reading: Optimizing Direct Mail for Maximum Results
For operations teams managing high-volume mail in regulated environments, automation means more than just speed and cost-effectiveness — it ensures compliance, security, and reliability at scale.
Automation and AI offer significant benefits and practical applications for direct mail marketers. By leveraging automation and AI, you can enhance personalization, improve targeting, make processes more efficient, and gain real-time analytics for optimizing campaign performance. Integrating automation and AI in direct mail campaigns provides a competitive advantage in today's marketing landscape, allowing you to quickly and efficiently deliver more relevant and impactful messages to your customers that drive bottom-line ROI impact.
Lob's platform automates the direct mail execution process for enterprises at any scale - from creation, printing, postage, delivery, and sustainability with end-to-end analytics and campaign attribution.
To explore the power of automation and AI, request a demo of Lob's intelligent direct mail automation platform.
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