Integrate hyper-personalized direct mailings into cross-channel customer lifecycle journeys
What has long been taken for granted in email marketing was considered too complex and time-consuming in print mailings: highly personalized messages, tailored to the individual customer's customer lifecycle. As a result, physical mailings led a parallel existence to digital marketing in many companies and were largely excluded from individualization and automation.
More conversions through fully automated programmatic print
Direct mail can and should be handled like an online channel, because highly personalized mailings with customer-specific content generate more revenue than traditional mailings. In addition, CRM mailings are perceived much more exclusively and personally based on the individual customer life cycle phase and thus increase loyalty.
We have teamed up with optilyz to implement such cross-channel projects. Optilyz is available as an extension for a variety of leading marketing clouds and CDPs. Regardless of whether our customers use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Emarsys, CrossEngage, Apteco or HubSpot — with optilyz, we can integrate direct mailings in the form of letters, postcards or self-mailers such as digital channels (web, email, social, ads, telemarketing) into automations and individualize them with product recommendations, text or 1:1 image personalizations, for example.
Getting Started: A successful pilot campaign in five phases
What should marketers pay attention to conceptually, creatively and organizationally when they want to integrate programmatic print into their lifecycle communication? Together with optilyz We have compiled our experience from customer projects and identified 5 phases for a successful cross-channel (pilot) campaign.
Phase 1: Strategic Objectives and Potential Analysis
- Which campaign is worthwhile for the (pilot) project? First, identify the journeys in which Direct Mail can be used sensibly and revenue-generating and as a supplement to the digital channels that have been implemented so far.
- Put online and print specialists together at the same table. Discuss what journey or print routes you have already set up and where there are overlaps, points of contact or completely new approaches.
- Decide in which life cycle communication channels the integration of Programmatic Print is most worthwhile — for example lead activation, shopping cart abandonment, welcome routes or reactivation.
Phase 2: Concept and creation
- Define the basic concept and channels: Who do you address when, with which message via which channel? What is the opt-in situation — who can you address on which channel? What are the previous individual response values of the contacts for the respective channel?
- Next is the target group-specific conception of the channel content and its creative development. For example, landing pages, ads and dynamic email templates are being designed for online channels and templates with corresponding image and text placeholders for print mailings.
- It is then necessary to develop images and texts for all channels to match the placeholders specified in the template.
Phase 3: Technical Design
- Personalizations for target groups: Which database fields do you need for segmentation and personalization? Is all the data you need already available and is it available to your marketing platform?
- Journey Design & Flow Control: Which decisions are made within the journey, which channels are controlled?
- Create a data model: Preparation of the data for the target list, which is required both for journey entry and for personalization in optilyz.
Phase 4: Technical implementation
- Optilyz connection: the software can be activated in almost all leading marketing clouds and CDPs in just a few clicks (e.g. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Emarsys, Dymatrix, CrossEngage, Apteco, HubSpot and many more).
- Implementation of the data model in the marketing automation platform, including creating journeys, segments and automations as well as setting up the data transfer to use the data for optilyz
- Implementation in optilyz: Finally coordinated layouts with placeholders are combined with the data in optilyz (mapping).
Phase 5: Testing and optimization
- Testing and optimization should take up a lot of space in every highly personalized campaign. The procedure here is generally comparable with the processes in e-mail marketing. This also includes A/B testing, for example of other formats (letter instead of self-mailer) or other graphics.
- Joint review and evaluation of results, optimization of the approach and development of new variants.
Together, digital channels and print can strengthen each other and open up new opportunities for marketing to succeed. The data and technical infrastructure is already available in the marketing automation platform or marketing cloud you are currently using, and the effort is manageable — if you have the right tools and partners.
