How To Combine Direct Mail With Email for Real Estate Marketing
Traditional mail and email may seem like opposites, but in the real estate world, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. You can use these tools to target different audiences, build authority, nurture leads or reinforce your current message, so there’s no lack of strategic outreach options. Here are some reasons realtors love combining traditional mail and email.
How Realtors Can Use Direct Mail and Email Together
The Value of Direct Marketing in the Digital Age
Think you’ll win the most hearts by enabling your farms’ addictions to email and social media? These marketing channels have notoriously low response rates, so you’ll need to work extra hard if you restrict yourself to digital opportunities.
Direct marketing statistics for 2018 and 2019 seem to reinforce this concept. Only about 1 percent of people respond to emails, social media and paid search, but 9 percent will reach out to brands that send them mailers, such as sports schedules or postcards. Even if you catch someone’s attention via email, your time in the spotlight is fleeting — About 78 percent of inbox marketing gets diverted to spam folders or deleted instead of being read.
Understanding Outreach Response Behaviors
The persistence of direct mail may have something to do with neuroscience. Research by Canada Post Corporation used eye-tracking and electroencephalography, or EEG testing, to survey people’s brain responses to promotional media. They determined that direct mail was associated with lower cognitive loading, or the amount of mental effort needed to understand the material. They also found that it was more persuasive and likely to drive behavior than emails were.
While some digital ads leave deeper impressions than others, they’re generally not as good at keeping people engaged for the long haul. Direct mail takes less time for people’s brains to process, so they may be more willing to interact with the brands it promotes.
How Direct Mail Makes up for Email’s Flaws
Data from 2017 suggested that combined outreach approaches drove success rates 35 percent higher than what might be expected from direct mail or email alone. There may be a few reasons for this trend, including the fact that you’re reinforcing the message by giving people the chance to view it from numerous angles.
Other research showed that people were more likely to spend when businesses used both tools together — Patrons sunk about 25 percent more money into these companies. More pressing for realtors, 75 percent of one study’s subjects could remember brands after seeing direct mail as compared to only 44 percent for email.
People also said that they felt like they were being treated with increased regard when receiving physical mail. Such sentiments could prove key to establishing respectful, profitable relationships with consumers. Even if email blitzes are faster routes to certain customers, they don’t always send the right messages.
Implement a Hybrid Approach
Neither direct mails nor emails can solve all of your marketing problems. There’s no anticipating which of your ads a potential client might be staring at the instant your branding clicks with them, so cover all of your bases.
Emails and direct mail serve distinct purposes, so be discerning about which branding objectives you use them to achieve. For instance, Every Door Direct Mail, or EDDM, postcards capture the attention of entire neighborhoods economically, and you can follow up with those who respond via email. Mailers like branded sports schedules and market updates get people to associate your name with useful information, but emails may be helpful for those doing their own in-depth market research.
Quality marketing materials are the keys to a perfect real estate advertising approach. Unify your digital and physical marketing campaigns by talking to a Reamark expert today.