Did you know? One of the reasons marketers are so invested
in digital channels is, on the flip side, the same reason marketers can find
hidden value in direct mail? Search!
Increasingly, marketers understand the power of online content
marketing. The statistics vary from 67%, to 74%, to even higher, but regardless
of the number or the source, the consensus is the same. Most people have
already most of their research before they contact a salesperson.
It’s one of
the reasons content marketing is growing by leaps and bounds. Marketers must
get their information out there in the digital space to draw people into the
funnel and be sure they are included in the research mix. Then they need to be
ready if and when shoppers decide to contact them as one of the final
contenders.
But what marketers may not realize is that this is also one
of the reasons direct mail is so important. What if people don’t realize there
is a product or service like yours out there? As one MSP put it on its blog,
“If I [the customer] don’t know about the category, I can’t search for it.” Or,
“I didn't realize there was a product/service that had that benefit over what
I'm using now.”
As an example, the impossibility of cleaning hydro tanks
comes to mind. When my husband goes trail running, he likes to mix half
Gatorade and half water in his hydration tank so he can continue to ingest
fluids during the run. At the end of the run, the tank needs to be cleaned out.
Have you ever tried to clean one of those things? It’s nearly impossible. You
can buy those long scrubby things on the end of a wire, but they are a real
pain. The joy of the run is offset by the need to spend an hour scrubbing out
the tank at the end.
Imagine our joy to discover a product that cleans hydro
tanks with a simple capsule. Fill the tank with water, drop in the capsule,
wait, and then drain the water out. Genius! But we didn’t go searching for a
solution to our problem. We didn’t even know there was a solution out there. If
it hadn’t been put in front of us, we wouldn’t have thought to go looking for
it.
In this case, the product came to us another way (thank you,
Shark Tank!), but it is one of the values of direct mail. If customers are
satisfied with the product they are currently using, why would they go looking
for something else? What if you are offering a product in a category they don’t
know much about? This is where direct mail has so much power.
Mead Johnson capitalizes on this phenomenon. It drops direct
mailers with coupons and information booklets on its Enfamil infant formula in
front of new mothers, who are often busy with their new bundles of joy that
they may not have time to research the product category, understand the
different formulas, or do comparison shopping. The booklet arrives on their
doorstep, along with a coupon, and Mead Johnson has a captive audience. If they
are struggling with a competitor’s formula and are exposed to facts about the
options provided by Enfamil, so much the better.
TMR Direct, a direct mail and inbound marketing company,
puts it this way: “People tend to search to solve an immediate problem. But
what about smaller problems, or problems you may not know you have, or things
you've just never spent much time thinking about?”
These are great questions—and great reasons for your
customers to continue using direct mail.
Article From: whattheythink.com
