Case Study

The Problem:

WANTED AN IMPROVED DIRECT MAIL CAMPAIGN WITH INCREASED CONVERSIONS

The public utility company used its direct mail program to recruit energy customers to enroll in its insurance program, which would protect the customer’s appliances from a power surge through their electric meters. The company would send between 500,000-1 million direct mail pieces per month, with an expected conversion rate of around 0.08%.

The Solution

AMPLIFIED DIRECT MAIL CAMPAIGNS

We implemented an enhanced direct mail campaign augmented with the boombox^TMamplification toolbox. boombox integrates the power of customized digital interaction with direct mail campaigns to get the message to the target audience through multiple channels to increase conversion. boombox enables us to reach the target audience with the client’s message between 8-32 times throughout the campaign.

Starting in April 2022, we partnered with the client to test different variables of the direct mail piece on a monthly basis. The variables we tested included, among others:

Consumer target groups to whom
the offer was mailed
The offer itself
Creative execution
Envelope type

The goal of variable testing was to determine which variable(s) would optimize the performance of the direct mail campaign. In addition to testing these variables, we also overlaid boombox digital marketing tools to optimize engagement opportunities throughout the campaign. We went to work by implementing the following in our client’s campaign:

Social match: Before sending any mail, we matched our client’s mailing list with Facebook and Instagram accounts, so ads could appear in the target audiences’ news feeds before the physical mail arrived. This primed them for the direct mail piece.
USPS Informed Delivery®: This feature enables individuals to receive a daily preview of the mail they’ll be receiving via email. For our client, the four-color direct mail piece was shown at the top of each Informed Delivery email sent, providing an additional touchpoint with the target audience members before they received the physical mail piece.
Campaign tracking dashboard: We were able to tell our client exactly when the mail campaign hit mailboxes each month. This was vital information to our client to be able to staff its customer service teams appropriately.
Increased frequency via digital follow up: Because we know that 80 percent of sales are made between the eighth and 12th touch, for 30 days after the direct mail piece was delivered to our client’s consumers, we continued to keep the client’s digital ads in front of prospects while they were scrolling through their news feeds on Facebook and Instagram and on Google display network. If prospects left the client’s website without taking action or converting, we continued to show the client’s digital ads throughout the Google Network, directing them back to the client’s website.

The campaign tracking dashboard has been especially helpful to our client. Throughout the campaign, our team and our client can both monitor the complete rollout of the campaign through the dashboard. We can see the delivery of mail and digital ads as well as response rates in real time. Because we were testing multiple variables of the direct mail pieces, we were able to determine which of the variables was most effective and had the strongest ROI.

The Results

DOUBLED CONVERSION RATES ... AND THEN SOME!

We were able to more than double direct mail conversion rates to +0.2% among certain prospect groups for our client’s insurance program. We also created and tested updated creative in direct mail pieces to identify a new direction with more visual impact and an optimized offer.

With social matching, we gave our client a way to use digital marketing to amplify its offline direct mail efforts and increase conversions through the increased frequency of the marketing message in social media ads.

We’ve started nurturing leads through the conversion funnel with LEADMATCH, a feature of boombox that delivers a list of who from the mailing list visited our client’s website and what actions they took. With this feature, our client can send direct mail to visitors to the website who didn’t convert, even if they weren’t on the mailing list! Using this information, we can later recontact the unique visitor with a richer offer.

With Informed Delivery, our client knew when the direct mail pieces would be arriving in the target audiences’ mailboxes, so the company was able to appropriately staff its customer service department to handle increased traffic.

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The Future

MANAGING ALL PROMOTIONAL PRODUCTS

The goal was a streamlined tool for distribution and collateral from a source that could provide both fulfillment services and print-on-demand services through a single tool. Brandstash was the appropriate solution, and delivered results quickly.

Since working with Southeastern, our client has experienced an enormous increase in speed to market, allowing it to quickly put together ideas, develop the collateral, and get the collateral out. Promotional products are important to its clients and trade show strategy, and since working with Southeastern, products have been creative at drawing attention to the brand.