How Social Media and Mail Can Partner for ROI

Social media and traditional "snail mail" seem a marketing odd couple, but they can work well together to deliver improved response rates, customer insights, creative testing, targeting and branding. Mail lists can build social audience, and social ads can build mail names. In fact, Facebook, the biggest consumer social media platform with more than 2 billion users a month, actively encourages marketers to upload direct mailing lists for matching against user information in order to run hyper-targeted paid social ads. Plus, Facebook ads can drive prospects to a landing page that offers an incentive to capture a physical mailing address in order to build up mailing lists. Social geo-targeting can be used to tailor mail geo-targeting, too. Before prospecting in a specific geographic area with a costly mailing, try inexpensive research using social media. Send a promotion to a social media platform's users in targeted zip codes and review the analytics to see which areas responded to which messages most favorably and then tailor direct mail list and creative. Social media also can help optimize direct mail via social apps and ad analytics that provide demographics, interests, and response data for targeting consumer and business audiences. Those insights can be applied to mailing list segmentation and targeting selections to increase direct mail response. Plus, social media ad creative can be tested and tracked to see which messages and images perform best with which audience segments, with the results used to inform the messages and images used in physical mailers. Finally, marketers can merge social insights and data from social media profiles with CRM and marketing automation to craft direct mail triggers and to create personalized mail content. Marketers can cross-promote on social media and direct mail to marry social media's ability to generate engagement and excitement with mail's ability to deliver personalized, lasting, tangible information. Of course, the creative and offer should mirror each other in both channels for consistent branding. For example, marketers can pump a product launch on social media and then mail brochures when product hits stores. Vice versa, direct mail pieces can include social icons and QR codes linked to a social page to recruit social media followers or promote social sharing incentives. For more, see https://www.acculist.com/social-media-allied-with-direct-mail-delivers-marketing-wins/