The holiday season always sneaks up quickly. It’s intense, competitive, and dynamic. And with retailers expecting shoppers to spend less this year because of the economy, successfully converting consumers will come down to good timing, precise targeting, and compelling offers.
Programmatic Direct Mail can help you engage in-market consumers to buy from your brand where they start most of their holiday shopping: at home. PDM engages consumers with highly relevant physical media using machine learning and automation powered by vast quantities of real-time intent and offline data. This helps marketers spend their precious dollars more wisely.
To help you get ahead this holiday season, we’ve made a short seasonal event countdown list (and, yes, we’ve checked it twice) with tips on the ideal timelines, creative formats, and mail classes for your PDM campaigns.
Spread the Holiday Cheer Early
30 days: Our recommended best-practice buffer between the mail send date and the creative expiration date for First-Class mail across all products.
During the holidays, you want to spread the word about sales as early as possible to get people interested.
Be Merry and Bright, and Get the Timing Right
14 days: The ideal timing for specific, shorter promotions and sale periods.
Offer codes with expiration dates create a sense of urgency with the consumer. We recommend a minimum buffer of two weeks if brands have key promotions they want to heavy up against by a certain date. Pause any creatives expiring within 14 days.
Ring Those Bells (and Those Cash Registers)
10 days: The time you should give consumers to act on their direct mail offer.
The last direct mail send is usually two weeks before the sale ends. This is also when you should switch to a holiday creative or turn it off depending on whether or not you are promoting an evergreen product.
Sleigh the Sale Through the Mail
2 to 7 days: The time it takes for a direct mail piece to reach the mailbox.
Regardless of the sale or offer period, it takes up to a week for Standard-Class mail and up to five days for First-Class mail to arrive. And then, it takes another few days for the consumer to act on the offer.
Maintain brand presence this holiday season with these additional tips:
- For tentpole creative where timing in-home is essential, we recommend always running First-Class mail for any product. Standard Class is best for one-time sends to specific audiences instead of always-on strategies like retargeting with no time-sensitive offer.
- We recommend running a prospecting and engagement campaign for at least four weeks before the start of your holiday campaign if you want to engage new audiences during this holiday season. This additional time will allow for better attribution and ensure that your mailer provides the best experience for the consumer by guaranteeing it is in the consumer’s home with enough time for them to prepare and respond to sale periods and be a continued brand reminder.
- Match creatives to different audience segments in different phases of the buyer journey and prepare to scale during the holiday rush. You can run more customer retention and lifecycle campaigns to show your most loyal shoppers you care.
Regardless of the season, getting the most value from PDM as a channel requires an “always-on” approach.
PebblePost can help you put the perfect bow on your seasonal campaigns. Download this handy checklist here and if you’re ready to see how Programmatic Direct Mail can give you the gift of outstanding marketing results, get in touch today.
