When I decided to open my own salon and spa, I had so many friends excited to try my services that I didn't think I needed to invest in marketing. Those friends did come in frequently, but their business turned out to just not be enough to keep my bills paid. I then remembered that before I began as a hairdresser, I drove many miles to see my favorite hair-stylist that I loved. That made me realize that I needed to advertise not just locally, but throughout the entire region. I drove an hour to my favorite hair-stylist, so why wouldn't my customers? I held a great "new customer discount", and soon those new customers from neighboring cities became regular customers once they realized how much they loved my technique. I created this blog to help other struggling business owners. I hope you can learn from my experiences!
Retargeting is one of the most useful tools in the e-commerce marketing arsenal. When new or returning customers visit your site, you're able to track them using cookies. If they leave your site without making a purchase, you're able to make an automatic ad buy on internet advertising platforms that specifically target them, ensuring that they will see an ad for your company. Since these customers have already expressed an interest in purchasing your products, you'll get better conversion rates when your ads remind them of your site.
Unfortunately, digital retargeting suffers from the same problems as other forms of digital advertising. Many customers simply ignore internet advertisements, and some use ad blocking software on their web browsers that prevent them from seeing them at all. Even if you send returning customers an email after you've noticed they have been browsing your site, promotional emails often go unread.
Direct mail retargeting is one of the newest innovations in e-commerce marketing, and it solves these problems. Instead of purchasing digital ads or sending customers an email, direct mail retargeting automatically prints and sends a customized promotional mailer to their home address. This has a number of benefits over both bulk mailing and digital retargeting. Are you interested in integrating mail retargeting into your e-commerce marketing strategy? Read on for some more information about how this innovative marketing technique can help boost your sales.
How Does Direct Mail Retargeting Work?
The first step is to contract with a company that offers automatic mail retargeting and add their tracker to every page on your e-commerce website. This allows the marketing company to monitor all of the traffic going to your page.
After, you work with the marketing company to set some basic rules about who you want to retarget. You may wish to retarget customers who view a certain number of pages, view certain high-margin products or who add items to their cart. This focuses your retargeting strategy on high-value customers that are likely to buy, which makes the most out of your advertising dollar.
When the marketing company's tracker finds a customer who meets your criteria, a printing company automatically prints up a custom mailer and sends it to their home address.
Can Direct Mail Retargeting Only Be Used for Current Customers?
Since the mail is sent to their home address, it's natural to assume that only returning customers can be retargeted. However, this isn't true — direct mail retargeting works even for new customers.
The marketing company's tracker will record the unique IP address of every customer that visits your page. Marketing companies who specialize in mail retargeting maintain databases that can often match an IP address to a customer's home address, even if they have never shopped with your company before. This allows you to automatically send promotional mailers to new customers, rather than only focusing on returning customers.
How Does Direct Mail Retargeting Boost Conversion Rates?
As mentioned above, many customers simply ignore digital ads and emails. However, it's much more difficult to ignore physical mail sent to your home address — customers are very likely to read your promotional mailer, especially if you personalize it.
Since the promotional mailer is printed and sent to the customer on demand, it can easily be customized to boost conversions. A customer who left items in his or her shopping cart can be reminded of its contents, and you can even give the customer a special coupon code they can use to get an additional discount on their cart contents.
A personal coupon code is enticing for customers who were on the fence about their purchase. Even better, it also allows you to track the results of your direct mail retargeting campaign — you can monitor which personal coupon codes are entered and see where you're getting the most conversions. This gives you the necessary metrics to continue refining your direct mail marketing campaign to further boost sales.
Overall, direct mail retargeting is uniquely positioned between digital targeting and bulk mailing without the disadvantages of either — customers are more likely to pay attention to physical mail instead of digital ads, and it's much more targeted than bulk promotional mailers. If you're interested in this innovative e-commerce sales strategy, the first step is to contact a marketing company that provides direct mail retargeting — they will tell you how to set up the tracker on your e=commerce site and work with you to figure out the best subset of customers to retarget.
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