Programmatic Direct Mail (PDM) ranks among the top emerging, fast-growing offline-to-online media channels. These channels—connected TV, digital out-of-home, and audio—leverage legacy offline marketing tactics digitally, painting a complete picture of consumers and closing the loop on marketing measurement.
Here are three reasons why testing non-traditional media channels like PDM can help benefit your overall marketing mix and performance.
1. It allows marketers to deliver a truly omnichannel experience
We know it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach today’s consumers because of digital noise, privacy legislation and browser changes, and a return to in-store shopping. These factors make it harder to engage and track consumers and measure their responses to marketing campaigns. Consider that:
- Brands waste 20% of their marketing spend’s ROI when leveraging digital in a silo.
- Consumers now engage with five channels before making a purchase.
- 80% of all shopping occurs in-store, but 56% use smartphones to shop or browse products in a physical retail location.
This is why industry experts like Insider Intelligence Analyst Jeremy Goldman recommend advertisers take advantage of “innovative formats that break through the clutter.” While some consumers may ignore an email or unsubscribe, they might be excited to receive a postcard that sends them to a retail store to score a deal on an item they’ve been browsing online.
In other words, an “omnichannel” strategy can’t just mean “omni-digital.” Brands must be present across all channels to reach consumers when and where they are decision-ready.
2. It increases reach, performance, and ROI
Half of US adults use an ad blocker, and with the average email open rate hovering around 20%, 80% of your customer or prospect lists are missing your marketing messages. Google and Yahoo have also started enforcing new requirements for bulk email senders, making it even harder for brands to execute email marketing campaigns successfully. Google considers anyone a bulk sender if they deploy over 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses within 24 hours. The company has rejected a percentage of non-compliant email traffic since April.
An omnichannel approach that leverages offline-to-online media, such as PDM, can expose customers and prospects to messages beyond what they might ignore on display ads or never receive in their email. Given that a brand’s universe of potential customers is anyone with a household address, they have access to a vast audience that can help in areas like customer acquisition and audience modeling. And while a consumer can quickly delete or ignore an email, most check their snail mail daily. There’s just no ignoring PDM.
Coordinating direct mail and digital can also result in a 60% increase in ROI because marketers can amplify and reinforce digital messaging to decision-ready, in-market consumers.
3. It makes marketing truly addressable
In 2025, companies relying on third-party cookies and data will find it increasingly difficult to resolve identity accurately and make deterministic decisions about individuals and households. That won’t be a problem for channels like PDM.
PDM provides brands with a future-proofed means of engaging decision-ready consumers because it’s built on household IDs, not digital identifiers that could be deprecated at any point. Consumers can change their email addresses whenever they want and ask apps not to track them online. But they’ll only likely move a handful of times in their lifetimes, making the household address a persistent identifier.
Download and dine with us
Want to hear more about using non-traditional media channels like PDM to engage decision-ready consumers? You have two options:
- Download the entire ebook “The Programmatic Direct Mail Imperative: How a Channel with Offline Roots Fits into Your Digital Marketing Mix” here.
- Sign up to attend one of our lunch-and-learn sessions, “Insights and Bites,” nationwide this summer here.
We hope you’ll consider either or both!
