Direct Mail Marketing with Personas
The best way to increase your chances of a great direct mail response rate is to mail to people who are interested in your product or service. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to create personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Many marketers are familiar with personas in their inbound or digital marketing, but for some reason have not applied them to their direct mail campaigns.
Benefits of Direct Mail Buyer Personas:
- Ability to target the right people for each message – send them only offers that they are interested in.
- Increase response – better offers equal a better response rate.
- Ability to find more prospects like your current customers – when you profile other people you can match them accurately to your current customers.
By creating buyer personas you can identify who your ideal customers are, where they are and what they want. When you combine this with variable data direct mail you can laser focus your message to each individual based on their persona while getting the benefits of postal discounts for a larger quantity rather than doing a separate mailing for each persona.
We get asked many times, how can we create personas?
Here are a few ways you can start researching:
- Interview or survey current customers – create questions that answer what you need to know in order to build your personas.
- Review LinkedIn profiles – try to find the common themes between each of your customers.
- Ask questions on social media – this can give you a larger pool than just your customers but be careful to fully vet each person responding before you add their input to your research.
- Profile your data – learn about your current customers by running a profile on them.
After your research there are some best practices for building your personas:
- Focus on motives not behavior. Why are they doing what they are doing?
- Keep them fictional but be as realistic as possible. Do not base them off of your most important customer, this can give you a skewed result.
- Choose 1 primary persona, this should be the group of people that will make you the most money.
- Create a story for each persona that is explained in 5 segments:
- What is their Job and demographics?
- What does a day in their life look like?
- What are their challenges or pain points?
- How do they search for information?
- What are their common objections to your product or service?
There are two big benefits to adding personas to your direct mail marketing. The first is that you can save money on services and postage, since direct mail’s biggest expense is postage you can save a lot, by not mailing to people who are not interested in what you are offering. The second is by getting more people to respond because they are interested in your offer. So, while you are saving money you are also making more money. It is a win – win situation! Are you ready to get started? Contact us today. We are glad to help!