Even with all the high tech gizmos and solutions out there, low tech outreach could be the way to go.
Over the past 12 – 18 months, I have seen more and more companies eschew traditional marketing methods in favor of online solutions. In other words, no postcards are being created, or mailed. Season information is left to email alerts, Facebook and blog posts.
One of my clients, however, still funnels a fair amount of money into brochures, postcards and snail mail. We have quarterly brochures that cover three months of programming, and each production has a postcard that gets snail mailed at the very least to our member base. To us, snail mail is still an important way to reach our audience.
In this Business Insider piece, Charles Nicholls of SeeWhy (a shopping cart abandonment consulting company–yes they have those!) points out that their reasearch shows that nine of the top 10 converting websites (sites that convert visits into sales) have physical old school catalogs. Of course, there’s more to it than that. But Nicholls points out, “Visitors that arrive at their websites are not cautious and in need of convincing because they have probably already been warmed up by an old-fashioned direct mail campaign and a catalog that arrived in their mailbox.”
A lot of new media marketing hinges on the word “trust.” Does your audience trust you enough to buy from you? Gurus often say that you can build trust over Twitter or Facebook, or from your blog. So I think it’s interesting that trust is also established, and in some cases, more so, by a direct mail campaign.
I still use snail mail. I am one of the only publicists left that snail mails releases. While I do send out information via email, I follow up those sends to key media with a snail mail release. They could be dealing with email overload, and a piece of mail may actually be an attention getter, since no one is sending them that way anymore.
Yes, it’s expensive. But perhaps it’s worth the expense.
Tell me, are you still snail mailing? Why or why not?
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