Look at brochures, order forms, or sales letters you recently received. All of them – every piece of mail delivered to your address – have a marketing strategy. Or, at least, they should have one. With the growing popularity of direct mail marketing campaigns, businesses are constantly looking for the most efficient mailing solution. Why? To  improve their end customers’ experience and help their clients drive sales. Automated mailing solutions are taking the lead because they make the mailing process fast, affordable, and effective.

One of the common choices a marketing professional makes  when planning a mail marketing campaign is between direct mail advertising and EDDM. So what factors should be considered? What are the benefits of selecting one type of direct mail delivery over another? Let’s take a closer look to analyze which option is more suitable for your advertising campaign.

Advertising Direct Mail vs. Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)

Direct mail advertising has been used for decades to send sales letters, order forms, and other print materials to a whole range of recipients. Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) mail is more recent. EDDM is usually used to send postcards to everyone living along a selected postal route. Both types of advertising campaigns ensure offline communication with potential customers, yet they also significantly differ in terms of:

Company Size

Large enterprises prefer advertising direct mail as a global mail service solution, rather than regional or local. This approach is more suitable for nationwide campaigns based on detailed preliminary marketing research. Smaller companies, on the contrary, choose to mail EDDM as a one-time or periodic investment in their local marketing strategy.

Print Marketing Materials

Marketing and advertising giants prefer advertising direct mail over EDDM, this type of mail marketing campaign usually requires more print materials. For a direct door mail targeted at a small neighborhood or a single postal route, an order of a hundred copies might be enough.

Design and Customization

EDDM is a U.S Postal Service program, so creative expression on mailers must meet ‘commercial flat’ specifications. Direct mail advertising, however, offers more creative freedom. Direct mail can have any form, size or color, and can include a variety of content. If you’re using a direct mail automation platform, you will even have access to a custom template builder to design print materials on your own.

Response Rate

With its advanced customization, advertising direct mail on average has a higher response rate than direct door mail. End receivers are more likely to read direct mail that lives on the countertop of mail and keep it for future use. Especially if you put a coupon or discount code on your print mail!

Automation

You can use automated mail services for sending advertising direct mail to people in your database. Automated mail services will save you time and efforts on printing & shipping by automating the whole mailing process. While there have been some attempts to automate separate elements of the EDDM sending process, it’s still rather limited in this respect.

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Target Audiences

With direct mail advertising, your database is crucial for the campaign’s success. You will need to make sure you’ve selected the right people from your CRM, have the right details and addresses when filling out the envelopes, and haven’t misspelled their name. The process of target audience customization is more sophisticated in direct mail advertising than in EDDM. Here, automated mail software will really come in handy. CRM integration, for example, will significantly simplify and speed up the process for you. On the other hand, EDDM doesn’t offer a possibility to properly narrow down your target audience – you will only select a certain postal route, and the envelopes will not be addressed to specific people, nor will they include their names.

Location

As it was already mentioned, EDDM is highly location based. This mailing program is usually limited to the area where a company operates, with the residents of the neighborhood all being a part of the target audience. Direct mail advertising is less location specific – instead targeting  the recipients across the U.S. This means it’s also perfect for the existing customers or for a list of high potential leads you’d like to nurture.

Cost Efficiency

Speaking of expenditures, everything depends on the chosen approach. If you hire a graphic designer to create unique direct mail designs, your overall cost of direct mail may increase. However, if you use automated mail systems, you can use ready-made templates that can easily solve this problem. What about direct door mail? Unfortunately, due to the large size of the standard EDDM, printing cost is quite high. So remember that while EDDM is comparatively cheap in postage, it’s usually more expensive in printing.

Final Tips on Making a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign More Effective

Regardless of the type of a mail marketing campaign you choose, automation software will save you lots of time, effort, and money in the long run. Be it full-scale automation offered for advertising direct mail campaigns, or automating some elements of the process where full automation is not yet possible (like in EDDM), the resulting ROI makes direct mail advertising  worth the investment. Inkit offers a range of useful functions that can boost the effectiveness of your direct mail marketing campaigns:

• CRM Integration. Integration with CRM systems, push-notifications, email marketing, and customer data services.
• Automated printing & shipping. Delegate the whole mailing routine to professionals to make it more cost effective and speed up the delivery process.
• Unlimited batch size. Send thousands of sales letters or a single order form depending on your needs and marketing strategy.
• Split testing. Make sure the selected piece of mail is the best option by sending several versions to different people and analyzing their responses.

Want to automate your direct mail or EDDM and create successful marketing materials? Inkit is just what you need. Don’t hesitate to try it!