Heating Up: Retargeting with Direct Mail

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Retargeting isn’t just for digital campaigns anymore. Companies are coming up with innovative solutions for retargeting lost website customers with snail mail, as well.
By Heidi Tolliver-Walker
Published: January 8, 2018

Have you been hearing more about retargeting with direct mail lately? I have. I was recently asked to pull together some resources on the topic, and I was actually surprised how many service providers are promoting it on their websites. The number is certainly growing.
The value of retargeting is the bump that gets applied to the campaign as a result of reminding the recipient of their initial interest in a product or service.  These service providers claim that their customers are seeing ROI and conversion rate increases that are significantly higher than those with digital retargeting services.
Here’s how it works: Someone lands on a website, searches on a product, showing initial interest, then moves on without making a purchase. With digital retargeting, the next time the person logs into Facebook, Google, or even Pandora, an ad for that product pops up in their feed or somewhere on the page, reminding them of their interest and increasing the chances of a sale. With direct mail retargeting, it’s the same idea except that instead of a digital ad, it’s a direct mail piece that lands in their mailbox within a few days.
One startup capitalizing on this concept is Pebble Post. It refers to its services as “Programmatic Direct Mail.”
The platform, which analyzes in real time the visitor activity on a desktop or mobile website or in a mobile app, segments users according to the campaign’s goals — such as “retarget anyone who looks at blue pants” — and then assembles a printed mail piece based on digital design templates provided by the marketer. API access to a range of e-commerce and CRM (customer relationship management) platforms enables street mailing addresses to be pulled, once the visitor is ID’d. . . . PebblePost then prints the mailer and gets it into snail mail within 12 to 24 hours.
Pebble Post claims to be the only company offering this type of service, but others are offering similar services. Each one handles it somewhat differently. Here’s how the service of another direct mail retargeting provider, Live Ramp, works:
  1. LiveRamp places a pixel on the customer’s website and provides notice and choice to all site visitors.
  2. It collects site-visit data in its secure system.
  3. The customer provides LiveRamp with a list of emails or names and addresses permissible for marketing.
  4. LiveRamp matches the unknown site-visit data to these identifiers, letting its customers market directly to previously unidentified browsers.[2]
Another provider is Reach Dynamics. The company leverages its “data network of more than 300,000,000 cookies” to match mailing data to the customer’s anonymous website visitors. It is promoting up to 3x ROI from these campaigns.
It’s exciting to see companies coming up with innovative solutions to use direct mail this way. We know that while customers like and expect personalized marketing, they do often find digital retargeting creepy. Direct mail not only has the benefits of tangibility, but it does avoid the creepy factor (not to mention ad blocking) that plagues the digital marketing community.
Are you offering retargeting using direct mail? What kind of results are you getting?

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