Programmatic Advertising Via Direct Mail
I can hear the Digital heads going What?? but a number of companies in the UK have garnered the cookie data that is traditionally used for targeted display advertising then matched the cookie to an actual address and triggered a digitally printed, highly relevant, perfectly timed Direct Mail pack to a user who has dropped off a site or failed to complete a shopping cart journey.
For a traditional Direct Marketer like me this is finally the link we have been waiting for to truly deliver integrated data marketing.
Royal Mail MarketReach in the UK is planning to muscle in on programmatic advertising trading desks with trials of a scheme which links online cookies with postal data to target consumers with mailshots rather than through online display.
Tapping into a brand’s existing successful abandoned bag email programme, UK companies are now targeting the non-responding customers with highly personalised mail, acting as a nudge to encourage them to complete their orders.
It has created a highly targeted daily mailing, using digital print, to present a visual reminder of the abandoned products or services , as well as using online behavioural data to dynamically show personalised ‘most browsed’ product categories.
Brands like JD Williams have seen a 14% basket recovery rate uplift that would not have happened without the personalised letters and postcards.
I have been saying for years that a multi channel approach works best as email or display or direct mail on its own is often is not enough to nudge the consumer to take action.
At DataXcel we have seen campaigns where we have emailed a targeted audience from our own 200k active Irish users, analysed the open and read rates alongside user demographics and then dispatched a direct mail piece to the openers within 48 hours. Brands using this simple process have seen a direct mail response uplift of over 30% as the email data has warmed and filtered the original cold data leaving a dataset that has a level of interest in the brand. It is then up to the brand’s propositions to extract the value from this warm data.
Given the proliferation in digital technology we will see more of this trend in 2017 where offline comms uses online channels to warm and create a targeted data set.
If anyone out there would like to develop such a product for Ireland let me know as we have over 200k Irish households with cookie, IP and email data all linked to their actual postal address with positive consent for marketing purposes.
Lorcan Lynch