For Raegan Johnson, a marketing expert in the association space, the buzz about digital marketing methods may be overshadowing an important fact.
“It seems like all the marketing buzz these days is on digital methods like search, social media, and email,” Johnson writes in Associations Now. “But direct-mail marketing may be poised to be more effective and powerful than ever.”
Why is that?
For one thing, Johnson believes much of it comes down to better data.
“As much ink is spilled about how much personal data Facebook and Google know about us, direct-mail data still reigns supreme,” she explains.
Andrew Fegley, president of Remarketable, agrees. “Advances in data-gathering, combined with the ability to segment and model with more precision than ever before, enables heavy-duty microtargeting with direct mail,” Fegley writes in Entrepreneur.
Secondly, direct mail significantly improves the lift of your online campaigns.
“In fact, The Little Book of Bigger Returns found that when direct mail was used as part of an integrated campaign, it boosted those brands’ ROI by 20 percent and helped improve the lift of online campaigns by a whopping 62 percent,” reported Fegley.
For associations, print continues to be vital to the overall marketing strategy. Associations are getting better at making it rain with print, and taking full advantage of the “lean back” benefits of association publishing.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the impact of association media booming, as associations are choosing to surround their members with content across the channels of their choice. And many, many of those members continue to choose print.