You’re spending time and money crafting marketing messages, but if you’re like most business owners, a large portion of them never actually get through. Nearly 1 in 6 marketing emails is never seen, and even when they are, the average open rate across industries hovers around 20 percent.
Add to that the rise of spam filters and call screening apps that block or silence unknown numbers (with only 13 percent of Americans even willing to often answer a call from an unknown number) and you have a serious reach problem.
It’s frustrating, right? You know your business could be helping people, but it’s like shouting into the wind.
At PostcardMania, we’ve worked with 127,785 small and independent businesses and have seen this challenge up close. The solution isn’t blasting more and more communication into already-crowded spaces. Instead, it’s building a smarter, balanced plan that meets people where they are, when they’re ready, so you can see what’s working and scale it.
Let’s talk about three ways to make that happen.
1. The most reliable way to reach real people
When your emails vanish into spam folders, direct mail still lands—literally—right in your prospect’s hands. It’s one of the few marketing tools left that almost guarantees your message gets seen.
About 90 percent of direct mail gets opened, compared to just 20–30 percent of emails. That means nearly everyone who receives a postcard will at least glance at it—and that alone puts you miles ahead of digital-only marketing.
Even more impressive: response rates for direct mail range from 4–9 percent, while social media delivers less than 1 percent in most categories, email averages 1 percent, and paid search is about 2 percent.
Unlike a digital ad that disappears in seconds, a postcard lingers. It’s tangible. It gets pinned to a fridge, handed to a spouse, stacked on a desk—and that physical presence drives recall.
Just ensure you’re mailing to the right people. Smart targeting lets you mail only to prospects who fit your ideal customer profile by geography, homeowner status, annual income, and more. And if you’re B2B, there are a multitude of targeting options as well.
Take this a step further by utilizing automations to ensure your direct mail outreach is responsive to consumer behavior, adding relevance and timing to the mix. There are a few types of direct mail automations to choose from:
- A CRM-driven automation will allow you to trigger mailers based on changes that happen within your CRM, like if someone becomes a new lead, goes a few weeks without responding, receives a quote, buys something, etc.
- Direct mail retargeting is a type of automation that triggers mailers to website visitors based on various factors like how long they’re on your site, which pages they visit, if they convert, etc.
- You can also set up location-based automations that automatically trigger mailers to people moving into a designated area, or people living near jobsites (popular with home service businesses).
Direct mail automation allows you to combine precise targeting, timing, and tangibility—all of which increases results.
The best part? Your competitors can’t outbid or out-algorithm you here. Just your message, delivered.
Make it easy for leads to find you
If direct mail is your outreach, inbound marketing like search engine optimization (SEO) is your magnet. It attracts leads who are already searching for what you offer, building credibility before you ever speak to them.
More than 68 percent of all online experiences start with a search engine, and blogging is a top driver of ROI for B2B. A strong SEO strategy ensures that when prospects search for your product or service, they find you—not your competitors.
Start by answering the real questions your audience asks. Use their language—not industry jargon—and focus on creating genuinely helpful content. When you consistently create content that answers real questions and uses the same language your customers do, you build trust before you ever talk to them. That trust turns into clicks, calls, and conversions.
The secret to marketing that actually works
Here’s where most businesses lose steam. They do the marketing but never measure what happens next. And that’s a huge mistake. Because when you track your results, you find out exactly what’s working and what’s wasting money.
Plus, businesses that use tracking and analytics in their marketing have 2.8 times higher reporting of double-digit growth. That’s because they’re not guessing—they’re learning.
Use call tracking numbers for every channel. Any call tracking service (or maybe even your CRM) can generate these numbers and track them for you, and walk you through setup. Once you have call tracking established for each channel, take it a step further and make sure that every campaign also has its own unique number. The goal is simple: If the phone rings, you know exactly what made it ring.
Next, you’ll want to generate tracking URLs that tell you:
- Which ad brought the person in
- Which postcard they scanned
- Which email they clicked
- Which platform (Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) did the heavy lifting
Google makes this incredibly easy. Use their Campaign URL Builder to generate UTM links, which are normal URLs with a few extra “tags” added to the end. These tags are magic—they tell you exactly where a visitor came from when they land on your website.
That’s how you stop guessing and start improving—by spending smarter.
Your audience is harder to reach than ever, but not impossible. You can’t control spam filters or call screening, but you can control how you reach your audience.
Joy Gendusa
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