Use Direct Mail to Increase Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is the emotional connection between a customer and brand. Broadly speaking, customer engagement encompasses the consumer's relationship with the business. Keeping people engaged throughout their purchasing journey (including your post-sale / existing customers) allows companies to build brand loyalty and improve critical sales metrics. These include upselling, cross-selling, and boosting CLV (customer lifetime value).

We live in a frenetic age where people have very little time for commercial messaging. Advertising campaigns need to make an emotional or intellectual connection to keep readers engaged. 

What is Customer Engagement?

Contrary to popular opinion, customer engagement is more than just a way to measure customers’ connection with your brand. Instead, it is an umbrella term for the different processes used to create, build, and maintain customer relationships.

A business that increases customer engagement focuses on creating value from a great product or service, offering excellent after-sales support, and devising effective communications that solidify the consumer’s experience.

High Consumer Loyalty Empowers Brand Ambassadors

Every business needs customers who will act as ambassadors for your brand.  These are people who have engaged with your company and want to share the experience.

Customer loyalty is all about transforming someone who purchases your goods or services into an active promoter, and who,

1. frequently interacts with your target audience on social media.
2. engages in your own discussion forums if available.
3. encourages subscribers to sign up for your goods and services
4. boasts about your new products from the rooftops
5. actively participates in your customer loyalty program
6. uses a wide variety of your CRM features (if applicable)

If you can create this emotional connection with your customers through various types of engagement platforms, then you’ve cracked the code. Let’s look at some ways companies like yours can do precisely that.

Well-tailored messaging in the headlines of direct mail pieces can be an effective way to create empathy with consumers. Your appeals can feel personal when brought into someone's home.  Advanced targeting can ensure your direct mail campaign will find the most likely mailboxes, in the right area, at the right time.

What Characterizes Good Customer Engagement?

What exactly is good engagement when it comes to your customers and business?  It can be defined as how a business communicates with your own customer database.  The interaction can come through ways of: 

• High rates of customer retention
• An increase in sales revenue
• Improving brand loyalty and trust
• Boosting brand awareness and visibility
• Top customer experience
• Increases in customer feedback and insight

When you can truly engage and understand the customer's wants and needs, this is where the magic happens and you start seeing the improvements in your business.

How to use Direct Mail to Increase Consumer Engagement?

Start with personalizing your message.  Since our mailboxes are no longer cluttered these days, this would be the time to take advantage of how and what you want to convey, fine tuning what your message is!  This can be done using your database for things like wishing a Happy Birthday message, customer loyalty programs or special offers that pertain to your customer.

Another recommendation is to have a call to action that is measurable.  Some may assume you need to offer a sale or a discount of some kind, but this isn’t always necessary.  What you need is something that is special, it’s unique to your business and will have the customer gravitate and want to engage with your brand.  It can be as simple as completing a survey or entering a contest that will generate a coupon code, as well as having a QR code.  It’s very important that your message is clear on what the consumer needs to do.  Without any clarity it becomes difficult to track and the campaign ends up being too expensive.

Which Mistakes Can Diminish Brand Loyalty?

Avoid printing and distributing anything that may be confusing. Avoid having more than one call to action, or more than one person to contact.  If you have more than one, it confuses the consumer in knowing what to do and they end up putting your direct mail piece to the side. The brand loses initiative and unfortunately you lose any potential engagement you were hoping to gain.  

It may sound silly, but your content and design should not be overlooked.  Having too many colours can confuse your brand, multiple font types or too many images is another fast way to lose consumer engagement. It ends up being too overwhelming for the eye or difficult to understand what the actual message is.  Customers may come to believe you don't even know your own message. 

Connect with your Audience to increase Customer Engagement

It’s a great reminder for all businesses to keep top of mind, strive to maintain and grow customer engagement.  This will always allow your business to showcase who and what your business is about.  The best part is you do not have to do this alone!  With the help of Direct Response Media Group, our experienced and knowledgeable marketing consultants are here to guide you and provide you with tips and tools to a successful campaign allowing you to grow your customer engagement.  Contact us today to start!