Discover the secret weapon for driving more web traffic to your site, grabbing new customers, and getting more business.

Visitors to GDMinteractive.com often ask why direct mail is one of our featured marketing services?  You might think that because GDM Interactive is focused on online marketing services we only consider search engine marketing, e-mail, banners ads and social networking. Not so…

Direct mail is your secret weapon for driving highly qualified web traffic.

Plus, it’s a secret weapon that is not available to all your competitors in the same way that web advertising is.  Driving web traffic with direct mail requires a more significant investment of cash up-front and requires a higher degree of skill. Driving web traffic with direct mail requires:

• effectively targeting the right audience
• developing a compelling offer
• write great copy
• maneuver your way through the postal system

Direct mail’s high bar of entry makes it hard for fly-by-night operations from overseas and pimple face kids in their dorm to drive web traffic using this technique. So, for serious business enterprises that are willing to put a moderate amount of cash on the line… direct mail is the way you can blow your competition away.

If you are considering using direct mail as your secret weapon to drive web traffic here are 8 big ideas you should consider along the way.

1. Maintain a consistent look and feel between your website and your direct mail.

Direct mail works more effectively with driving traffic to web sites when the offer, graphic design and even the copy are consistent between the two media.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Customers and prospects who come to your website because of your direct mail are more likely to become engaged with your website when the look and feel of their website experience matches the look and feel of the direct mail piece. Consistency is reassuring, and tells the customer they have come to the right place.

2. Don’t have the two channels competing against each other

This competition happens when special offers go out in direct mail but don’t appear on the web site or vice versa.
Here’s an example: one of our clients wanted to give away a $50 rebate on every order to drive web traffic and stimulate sales. We knew it worked for driving web traffic to the site. The problem was it didn’t work for converting organic search traffic to the point of sale. You see, organic traffic came with or without the stimulus of the rebate. So, for organic traffic they were giving away $50 on every sale without generating any extra volume. Finding a solution wasn’t easy or cheap.

However, it was worth it to put in the effort to make sure the website and direct mail were working together to give a unifying experience to direct mail prospects.

3. Strut your stuff… Show off your URL in your direct mail

If you have been using direct mail all along hopefully you have already figured out that you should be calling out your URL prominently to drive web traffic.  Yes, this can be frustrating because it is significantly harder to track your response results when orders and leads come in through your web channel. But resist the temptation to force customers to do it your way!

Nowadays your customers are just as likely to type in your URL or company name into the browser as they are to pick up the phone dial your 800 number. You may be missing out on sales if you don’t allow customers to order the way they want to order.

4. Which comes first the chick or the egg?

It used to be said that web sites were there to support other means of advertising such as direct mail, print ads or TV.  Websites were seen as the kind of an in-bound call center on steroids…  run by robots you never needed to pay! But now the tables have turned somewhat and in many ways direct mail supports your website and drives web traffic.

This reversal can give strategic guidance for development of direct mail. In the web 2.0 world your site is more than just an interface with your customers, customer experience is a product in and of itself.

Instead of dreaming of the direct mail campaign and seeing if you can get your website programmed to support your offer idea… why not take a look at all the cool things your website can do for your customer and develop direct mail campaigns that promote your website functionality? But don’t forget to spin it as an offer.

5. Your online buyers and direct mail buyers are the same people!
Online and direct mail buyers used to be considered to be different and distinct groups. Many marketers consider themselves to be reaching the younger hipper audience with their online sales. Most recent studies show that access and use of the web is no longer determined by age like it was.

This is an additional argument for consistency in message across the two channels.

6. Your direct mail can be much simpler when driving traffic to a web page

Using direct mail to drive customer traffic to your website means that you can use simpler and cheaper direct mail packages. Before universal access to the web if you wanted to sell your product through direct mail you had to provide the potential customer with a lot of information about the product they were considering for purchase. That meant, long letter copy, brochures, and high page-count catalogs.

But, with the ability to provide customers with in-depth information online your direct mail piece can be as simple as the lowly postcard. In-fact the postcard is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts… it’s a great way to get a simple and compelling offer in front of an audience very inexpensively. Plus, because you are driving your customer traffic to a webpage you no longer need a mail based response device or order form.

7. Use e-mail to support your direct mail promotions

Have an e-mail with similar copy, graphics, and offer go out one week prior to your direct mail. It should boost response on your direct mail and drive enough web traffic and response of its own to justify the time spent creating the e-mail.

8. Give web visitors from direct mail confidence online and off

The online world can still be a scary place with lots of fly-by-night scams and unscrupulous players. These people were active before the internet but it was harder and more expensive to run a scam in the old days (for the reasons mentioned in my introduction).

Make sure your website uses corporate branding such as logos, taglines, images and so forth. Be sure to use these same key elements in the direct mail piece(s) you use to drive web traffic.

Enhance your reputation with third party Logos that reflect transactional security such as credit card images, better business bureau seals, industry words, and page security icons. Consider using these same icons in your direct mail piece!

This is yet another way to apply consistency of look and feel.