Postcard Campaign Elements: Reach the Right Audience with Targeting
A core strength of direct mail marketing lies in the ability to get in front of a specific target audience.
Targeting the Right Audience
Direct mail has the exceptional ability to target an exact market segment that best suites your business.
The foundation to targeting is the identification of your specific target audience. An Ideal Customer Profile aides in documenting your exact specification.
Targeting by Demographics
Two broad classifications for segmenting a target audience are demographics and psychographics.
Demographics describe the identifying characteristics that group your audience by factors such as age, gender, profession, and income level.
Targeting by Psychographics
Underlying individual identities are the needs, desires, fears, and motivations that drive purchase behavior.
Both demographics and psychographics key up your audience for the specific offer and messaging your campaign will put in front of them.
Crafting a Targeted Mailing List
There are multiple sources for generating a mailing list that targets your desired audience.
Brokered mailing lists are available to target households or businesses by numerous factors. Consumer mailing lists may be filtered by geographic location, household income, consumer interests and more.
Partnered mailing lists may be accessed by working with an adjacent business and borrowing or swapping customer lists for cross-promotion to a select audience.
The Post Office also offers the ability to send to specific postal routes without the need of a mailing list through the Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) service.
Building Your Campaign Around the Target Audience
The true advantage in targeting is not just in reaching the right audience, but in being able to tailor the campaign to this audience.
After selecting your mailing list, every other element of the campaign should be considered with this target audience in mind.
The campaign offer, messaging, and call-to-action should all be aligned with the character of the selected target.
Efficiency and Effectiveness
Targeting can be very cost-effective. By sending your campaign to a targeted audience you are able to trim excess recipients and aim only for those most likely to respond. This makes your campaign more efficient.
And the additional tailoring of the offer and messaging to the target audience has the benefit of increasing the campaign's effectiveness.
Targeting vs General Audiences
In some cases you may wish to start with a campaign to a broad audience. This strategy of casting a wide net allows you to gain insight into who values your offer and its messaging by an analysis of those that self-select by responding to your campaign.