The average number of direct mail loan offers has skyrocketed during the online lending boom. This is due, in no small part, to the benefits of direct mail automation in fintech.
You may wonder why the financial technology industry isn’t sticking to email and social media marketing. They are, after all, sophisticated online businesses.
But successful fintech marketers aren’t sending generic junk mail. The rapidly advancing digital landscape provides fintech marketers an opportunity to make direct mail more effective than ever. If you’re marketing an online lender, you can supercharge the already high response rates of direct mail by syncing postcards with digital campaigns—and automating them.
Direct mail is the most effective direct response channel—beating all digital channels combined by a factor of up to 30.
When you trigger programmatic direct mail as part of your multi-channel campaigns (by integrating Inkit with your CRM) you can send direct mail that is as highly targeted as everything you do online.
At Inkit, our developers are working around the clock to build integrations with all the top marketing automation platforms so marketers can send (and test) postcards as easily as emails.
3 Use Cases for Direct Mail Automation in Fintech
There are countless ways fintech marketers can benefit from direct mail automation. At Inkit, we often suggest adding direct mail triggers to multi-channel campaign workflows where you struggle with email open or click-through rates. When you know your offer is strong, but you’re having trouble with engagement, simply run a channel test by reformatting the offer for direct mail.
Here are three additional use cases for direct mail automation for online lenders.
1. Expand fintech brand awareness and gain trust offline.
A strong brand awareness strategy focused on building trust is key to the future of any fintech company. Direct mail should be a part of your branding efforts because consumers trust direct mail far more than email and digital ads. This is true even for millennials. Direct mail indicates to consumers that your fintech is more than just smoke and mirrors, helping you earn their trust. So, send a tangible, customized, high quality postcard to introduce your business to potential customers. Be sure to include a link to supporting content online to validate your authority, and increase engagement, across channels. Direct mail can have a significant impact on your brand’s awareness as the majority of household decision makers sort and read their mail daily, according to a USPS study.
2. Warm fintech leads with highly customized postcard automations.
Physical ads, such as postcards, elicit a much stronger emotional response from consumers than digital ads. This makes direct mail an effective channel for warming and converting fintech leads. With Inkit, you can personalize direct mail just as you do with email, allowing you to send programmatic, triggered and highly strategic postcards. We suggest you provide lead nurturing throughout the customer lifecycle with high impact direct mail. Create postcard automations for sign-up bonuses, customer referrals, customer appreciation notes and more.
3. Gather data to tailor direct mail automations and increase engagement.
When you automate direct mail with Inkit, you put the power of digital marketing and targeting behind your mailers. But that’s not all. You can also collect more data and feed it back into your CRM to make your marketing even smarter. For example, LendingClub’s marketing and operations chief was quoted in the Wall Street Journal explaining that the lender uses mailers to pre-screen customers based on creditworthiness. Their mailers include tracking codes, so when someone goes to their site and enters a code, the company can gather information to refine its segments and further target mailers.
With direct mail automation, fintechs marry big data analytics with the high open rates of direct mail, all but ensuring higher conversion rates.
Do you have any questions about how to make direct mail automation work in fintech?
