B2B direct mail marketing is often conducted by B2B businesses to reach out to their prospects personally and directly. A company that conducts B2B marketing targets other companies as prospects but not individual customers. As such, you need to ask yourself about the best ways of reaching out to your target companies and persuading them to try your solutions out. Thinking about the available options, what comes to your mind are email marketing, social media marketing, and others. However, if you wish to try out something more promising, you can choose direct mail marketing. Direct mail is among the first outreach strategies that businesses employ. Additionally, it’s a tactic many modern businesses have chosen to abandon for more cost-effective and efficient digital tactics. Just like direct-dial communication, direct mail is an outdated approach with only 39% of customers saying they’ve tried a business for the first time owing to direct mail marketing.
Best Practices for B2B Direct Mail Marketers
Aligning Sales and Marketing
This practice can make B2B direct mail campaigns highly productive. And because your target is certain people in certain companies, it’s necessary to start by discussing the prospects with your sales team. It might happen that your target is the wrong people but in the right company. Hence, align sales and marketing before you add other people to your email list.
Including a Clear CTA
Ensure your direct mail items are eye-catching and personalized. Additionally, a marketer should include a straightforward and clear call to action. This should be something easy to complete and convenient. You can for example request a demo or fill up a survey form. In essence, CTA guides prospects on what they should do next.
Knowing Your Prospects
Marketers and business owners have to dig deeper and know their prospects, choices, life stages, preferences, and more besides mailing on their targeted mailing lists. Following them on social media helps you to know their needs and opinions. And if your product or service has been curated for several industries, ensure you’ve sent direct mailers that are relevant to a certain industry.
Personalizing Direct Mail
Personalizing direct mail helps you stand out from the crowd and grab people’s attention. Marketers should add their recipient’s first name, step ahead, and include details about their needs, choices, and likes. It leads to your potential customers feeling special and relating to your direct mail piece.
Thinking Out of the Box
The direct mail item you send should get your prospects excited. In fact, it should tempt them to show it to their friends and family members. Several B2B direct mail ideas are available for designing an impressive mail item. As such, be creative so that you can send something unique. Again, ensure you’re helpful to your friends.
Follow-up Consistently
A key element for successful direct mail campaigns is regular follow-up. Once you have conducted your campaign, stay in touch with your recipients and remind them about your brand, Moreover, a phone call, a follow-up email, and another mailpiece help you stay in their minds and indues them to take action.
B2B Direct Mail Use Cases
Connecting Personally with your Prospects
A B2B direct mail marketing approach helps companies to reach out and connect personally with prospects and with no intermediaries. This helps establish a one-to-one connection to solve all the doubts from prospects, respond to questions, present offerings, make negotiations, and finalize deals.
Expanding Your Network
Any business should focus on growing its connections and expanding its networks. Businesses can achieve this by printing and mailing postcards and letters to their most important social media followers or LinkedIn connections. Again, companies know many people through webinars, trade fairs, and other similar events. By sending personalized messages, you strengthen your relationships and make them potential clients.
Converting New Clients
Loyal and existing clients bring you to repeat business but getting new ones along the way is also important. A company can send B2B direct mail to the relevant audiences and spread brand awareness. Further, add promotional offers to assist in getting more clients and improve the returns on investment ultimately.
Keeping Your Audience Engaged
Send direct mails to your prospects as well as house lists regularly to ensure they remain engaged with your brand. Companies should promote their new product launches, conduct contests, make event announcements, and promote seasonal sales plus many more through the B2B direct mail. It’s a way of keeping the audience engaged all through and promoting your offers and events simultaneously.
Using B2B Direct Mail Marketing Throughout the Funnel
Direct mail marketing strategies can work throughout the customer lifecycle. Most marketing aspects including driving your brand awareness and preventing customer churn rate are enhanced by the direct mail effort. On top of funnel B2B marketing, direct mail marketing is an effective approach for driving brand awareness for your target accounts. Additionally, if the goal is about encouraging prospects of the target accounts to have a demo, you should send them some handwritten notes to introduce the brand. Make a follow-up through email as a way of booking a demo. A personal touch using handwritten notes makes the recipients likely to open and read your emails. In the mid-funnel B2B marketing, after the targeted accounts know about your brand, they are most probably evaluating whether the product you offer is fit for their needs. Essentially, direct mail is what sets you apart from the competition. Use it as a reward for prospects or customer engagements with the company. For example, after your customers or prospects attend a webinar, you can send them an eGift or a quick note with a message “thank you.”
On the other hand, the bottom-of-funnel B2B marketing, your prospects are at the bottom section of the funnel, already know you and understand your company because they have taken the time to do so. In order to ensure your prospects get to the finish line, you can send those personalized direct mails and gifts.
Conclusion
B2B organizations that operate an account based strategy often quote bridging the gap between sales and marketing as a big challenge. Marketing and sales teams should cooperate in developing their target account list. However, while incorporating direct mail into the strategy, departments must work closely to ensure the focus remains on the more valuable prospects. You do not want to send a marketing budget on direct mail campaign that will not convert your prospects into paying clients.