Customer engagement strategies that actually work

Engaging customers is one of the most important parts of any marketing strategy. Yet in today’s increasingly crowded environment, this is harder than ever. With so many brands competing for consumers’ limited attention and individuals constantly bombarded with messaging both online and offline, how do you cut through the noise and leave a real, lasting impression?

Why engagement matters today

Customer engagement may seem like a wide-ranging term, but put simply, it means how brands connect with and build relationships with their users. It matters because, without it, no organisation – whether it’s a retail brand, charity or arts institution – can hope to sustain success.

In today’s environment, you can’t rely on transactions alone. If you’re to build a long-lasting relationship, you need to foster loyalty that leads to retention and advocacy. This could be word of mouth through referrals to family and friends, positive feedback on review sites or direct recommendation via social media.

None of this can happen without an effective engagement strategy that ensures consumers remember your brand. To do this effectively, it pays to have a physical presence in their home or office – and this is where marketing strategies like direct mail come in.

Understanding the role of direct mail in customer engagement

While engagement is often used interchangeably with marketing, there’s much more to it. Marketing often has a specific goal in mind: to increase leads, to drive traffic to a website or boost sales, for example. It’s built on direct, one-way media and traditional channels.

Engagement is more of a two-way street. It’s about forming connections with audiences, starting conversations and making sure that next time they’re thinking about a purchase decision, your brand is at the forefront of their mind. This means it can sometimes be harder to quantify than more direct, sales-focused campaigns – but in the long term the benefits become clear.

A strong offline component is a key part of good engagement campaigns. While online channels like email and social posting certainly have their place, there’s something about tangible, physical materials that’s hard to replicate. When people can’t simply scroll past your message or click delete, this leads to higher engagement and, ultimately, improved brand performance.

This is borne out by the stats. According to WARC, direct mail campaigns have a 95 per cent engagement rate, while campaigns that include this element are 52 per cent more likely to report ROI benefits and 43 per cent more likely to see revenue uplifts.

What’s more, if you think younger, more tech-savvy consumers are more likely to respond to digital-only campaigns, you’d be wrong. WARC data shows nearly nine out of ten participants said they preferred a blend of physical and digital marketing, while 42 per cent have searched for a brand online after receiving direct mail and 84 per cent have scanned in a QR code from mail to interact with a brand online.

Core benefits of strong engagement

The above stats highlight how an effective, mixed media campaign that includes both direct mail and online elements can drive customer engagement. But what does this translate to in terms of real-world benefits? Here are just a few of the positives you can see as a result of a strong strategy:

Higher retention: When customers feel seen and understood, they’re far more likely to stick around. Engaged people come back, spend again and keep the relationship going.
Better lifetime value: Engagement goes beyond driving one-off sales. When these customers do come back, they’re likely to spend more over time and be open to exploring what else you have to offer.
Lower acquisition costs: The bigger and more engaged your existing audience, the less you need to spend chasing new leads for the same results.
Greater trust: When customers get useful, relevant content from you across different channels, they’re more likely to believe in your brand and feel good about buying from you.
Stronger consumer advocacy: If people are excited about your brand, they’ll happily tell others. Strong engagement turns customers into champions who recommend, review and spread the word on your behalf – all without you needing to spend.

Powerful customer engagement strategies that work

The benefits of a strong customer engagement strategy are clear. But how can you go about creating and executing a plan for this? Here are some tried and tested tactics to consider.

Personalisation beyond first names

We all know the importance of speaking to people directly – a mailer correctly addressed to the recipient by name is much more likely to be engaged with than one sent to ‘the occupier’. But good personalisation needs to go far beyond this and speak to an individual’s unique interests or desires.

For example, you can use data sources such as purchase history and CRMs to identify what they’re likely to respond best to. When it comes to direct mail, there are a range of personalisation options to assist with this, such as variable print and camera matching.

Timely and relevant communication

The right message sent at a bad time is actually the wrong message. To effectively engage audiences, you need to make sure you’re not only sending them what they need, but doing it when they need it. Use triggered campaigns for communications such as seasonal content and renewal reminders to make sure you’re not missing the boat by sending items too late.

Emotional connection and storytelling

Being able to tell your brand’s story clearly and in a way that resonates with audiences is essential for engagement. This may be especially true for organisations like charities and cultural institutions like theatres that depend on an emotional connection. This means focusing closely on both the design and content of your direct mailers to make sure they represent your brand clearly.

Using direct mail to strengthen engagement

Direct mail offers a number of benefits for boosting customer engagement. It offers an unignorable physical presence on a recipient’s doormat that online channels can’t match and provides a tangible, human connection.

Other ways in which direct mail can help engage audiences include:

Providing direct, personalised messages: If you opt to use envelopes, you can start the message before the addressee even opens the mailer by personalising the outside. Plus, most people will be keen to open personally-addressed mail.
Combining online and offline channels: The use of personalised URLs or QR codes can encourage people to move seamlessly from physical to digital channels for more information or to complete a purchase.
Increased visibility: Many physical posted items remain in the recipient’s home for days or even weeks – especially if you’re sending brochures, flyers or other informative content. Having audiences see your brand day after day helps you stick in their mind.

Measuring engagement effectively

Engagement for physical mailers can be more of a challenge to measure than some digital channels. For example, you can’t see directly what your open rates are, as is the case with email newsletters. But there are still a few things you can do to track responses and understand how effective your efforts are.

Trackable links and QR codes are one great way of doing this. As well as helping create personalised offers for recipients, this can give you direct insight into how campaigns are performing, also potentially allowing you to run A/B tests on mailers and see which messaging is most effective.

You can also use JICMAIL to access valuable campaign analytics. While this doesn’t offer live tracking for individual campaigns, its benchmarking tools provide insight into audience engagement across different media types, sectors and campaign formats. This can help you understand how your efforts are likely to perform, based on real-world data.

Practical tips for UK organisations

As we’ve seen, direct mail can be a powerful tool for boosting engagement and meeting marketing goals. But in order to make the most of this, there are a few key things to bear in mind. Following the below tips will help ensure your next campaign stands the best chance of success.

Start with good data: Complete, accurate data is the key to successful direct mail. Poor data quality means you send the wrong messages to the wrong people, directly harming your ROI. Our data cleansing service can avoid this by ensuring you’re not wasting money delivering to incorrect or duplicated addresses. As well as this, effective use of data is integral to ensuring you can apply the right personalisation to mailers.
Choose the right format: The type of mailer you choose can also have a big impact on ROI, from ensuring you’re optimising costs to sending items that really stand out on the doorstep. For example, envelopes offer great opportunities for added personalisation – but do come with an extra cost consideration. Using self-mailers, on the other hand, can save on the cost of envelopes – as long as they meet certain requirements. For instance, they must be sealed on three sides, as if they aren’t they can lose MailMark postage discounts. We can advise on how to strike the right balance between personalisation, cost and efficiency.
Test, learn and refine: Having the right tracking tools in place means you can see exactly what’s working, what isn’t and where to improve. Strong tracking and analytics give you the clarity to make better decisions over time by testing different formats, timings or audiences, then using the insight gained to refine your approach.

Good customer engagement must be an ongoing process – it’s not something that can be achieved in a single campaign. But by choosing the right messaging formats, combining mailers with effective online channels as the next step, and taking a data-driven approach that learns and evolves, you’ll be well-placed to reap the benefits of higher loyalty, greater advocacy and, ultimately, improved revenue.

Want to know more about how direct mail can boost your customer engagement? Contact us today.