How to Run a Direct Mail Campaign with Preferred Shipping Addresses

Account-Based Marketing, Direct Mail Marketing, Multichannel Marketing

By Virginia Sanders

Connecting with customers in today’s environment is harder than ever. As your competition turns to a digital-only strategy, this is your opportunity to stand out with a more personal and memorable touch.

Wondering how to send mail when most of your target audience is suddenly working from home?

PFL is working to help our customers adjust to the new environment. Here are several strategies to consider:

• Use SDR/BDR resources to confirm mailing addresses before sends.
• Collect preferred mailing addresses as part of your marketing automation campaign.
• Append home address data with a data service.

For our own marketing, we’re having BDRs confirm mailing addresses and have layered preferred address collection into our automated campaigns.

Read on to see how we built the campaign — and feel free to replicate it!

Note: Some of these steps will likely overlap for you, as they did for us.

Step 1: Craft your message and content.

Who’s involved: Marketing managers, content creators, creative team

Our strategy was to send our unused trade show swag (a playful pack of marketing meme cards with a tiny display easel). We’re hoping that it will brighten our prospects’ days and illustrate a way they can keep their goals on track despite trade show cancellations. For our call to action, we asked prospects to take a meeting with the sales rep named on the personalized note card.

If you don’t have trade show swag on hand, consider sending products that support your message or aid your prospect’s sudden transition to a home office. Some ideas include collateral (an ebook or whitepaper), sticky notes, headset, socks, tumblers, pens, and other highly useful, branded goods.

PFL’s quick-to-market Creative Collection can help at this stage for easy branding and messaging.

Step 2: Plan your touchpoints.

Who’s involved: Marketing managers, content creators, (eventually) sales reps

Multichannel marketing is a must for our team at PFL. Our multichannel marketing report with Demand Metric found that response rates go up with the number of channels used. However, multichannel orchestration is the biggest driver of success. Integration between direct mail and martech increases the likelihood of direct mail ROI by 63%.

Here’s how we structured our multichannel ABM campaign:

Target contacts receive warmup emails and web ads.

• We created four emails, but if a recipient takes the call to action early in the sequence, the emails stop automatically.

• The emails and ads drive contacts to a web form to collect the preferred address. (More on this in Step 4.)

Form completion triggers the send of direct mail.

• PFL prints, packages, and ships the package on-demand.

The contact receives the package.

• Our business development reps (BDRs) receive notice of delivery within 15 minutes thanks to PFL’s Tactile Marketing Automation software integration with FedEx. The BDR makes a timely call, increasing the opportunity for a live connection by up to 20%.
• If needed after the follow-up call, the contact will enter a follow-up sequence including additional emails and calls.

Step 3: Develop your contact list.

Who’s involved: Marketing operations

We started our list with 2019 and 2020 event registrants and attendees that fit our ideal customer profile (ICP).

Then, we segmented the list to identify target prospects not associated with an opportunity. We’re also allowing our sales reps and customer success managers to add contacts to the program through Marketo Insights, so they can show their in-pipe prospects and customers how we’ve adjusted our campaign structure to ask for addresses.

Finally, we built the audience in Marketo with an email address list.

Step 4: Build your web form to collect preferred addresses.

Who’s involved: Marketing operations, web development

At present, the best strategy is to collect preferred addresses for one-time use only. Consumers are understandably sensitive to sharing their home addresses. We want to be clear that we’re sending something fun and that we will use their preferred address just one time. After shipment of direct mail, we’ll delete the address.

To avoid overwriting our contact’s business mailing addresses in Salesforce.com (SFDC), we created a new set of preferred address fields in Marketo.

Necessary information to capture:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Address 1
• City
• State
• Postal Code
• Country

Our web developers made two versions of the web form landing page, each with a different audience and messaging. One is a general version for future use, and one is a much more specific page attached to this web campaign. (And hey, if you want to follow the second link and collect a Meme Easel for yourself, we won’t mind.)

Step 5: Create the Marketo campaign and ship it!

Who’s involved: Marketing automation specialist

Next, we created two campaigns in Marketo.

The first was a nurture campaign that sends our emails.

The second was a Tactile Marketing Automation^® (TMA^®) campaign that triggers direct mail fulfillment when a form is submitted.

• We made a Marketo webhook in the PFL Command Center that maps to our form fields.

• The webhook was inserted into the flow step of our TMA campaign in Marketo.

• When a prospect completes the form, the webhook is called, and our meme easel and personalized note are fulfilled and shipped by our lovely manufacturing co-workers.

If you need help with this step or any of the previous steps, be sure to reach out to your PFL Customer Success Manager.

This strategy gets us — and you! — up and running fast with a preferred address campaign. We guarantee that we will continue rolling out strategies, tips, and advice to make your marketing easier and more efficient.