In our experience, we’ve seen many companies who do still know the value of print marketing. But without a click-through rate to analyze or website visitors to count, it can be difficult to measure how effective your materials truly are. Mailers, brochures and catalogs are designed to spread your brand’s message and ultimately earn sales, so how can you make sure they convert as many leads as possible?
Thankfully, we’ve picked up a few tips over the years. Keep scrolling to discover how you can create print marketing materials that are as effective as possible.
Provide Contact Information
As you create each piece of your print marketing materials, be sure to include your business’ full contact information. This should include your brand’s phone number, sales email address, physical address, website link and social media profiles. As you create multiple marketing campaigns, consider using unique URLs and even phone numbers each time so you’re able to track where each lead came from. With multiple avenues to reach you brand, customers will be able to find you easily to begin the next step in the sales process or reach out to you directly.
Punch Up the Call to Action
To encourage your audience to take the next step, include a strong call to action within your print piece. Be specific, and tell your customers exactly what they should do next. The call to action should also have a relatively short timeframe to encourage customers to act immediately – otherwise, they may plan to take action later and then forget about it. If you have an e-commerce store, you may want to lead them directly to the site with a discount code they can enter at checkout. A code allows you to measure specific results to determine the effectiveness of the campaign. If you are a brick-and-mortar business, you might instead ask them to redeem a coupon in your store. For a subtler next sales step, you could consider asking them to follow your brand on social media or visit a unique landing page. With any of those actions, you can then continue to usher your prospect along the sales funnel.
Initiate a Follow-Up Process
If your prospect hasn’t taken the desired action within a few days, send them a follow-up message. There are a few different avenues you can take to effectively reach those targeted customers again. If you integrate a direct mailing list into an email platform, you can send follow-up emails over the course of a few days or weeks. You can also load a contact list into Facebook’s ad platform to serve your audience a strategic advertisement to provide an additional interaction with your brand. These multiple brand experiences are essential to eventually convert a lead. According to Salesforce, it can take between six and eight touches with a brand before customers are ready to make a purchase.
Perfect the Language
To ensure that your print marketing materials are worded as effectively as possible, try using A/B tests for the various language elements. The headline is key real estate for delivering an impact upfront, and the call to action brings the message home, so to successfully convert leads, you’ll want to make sure you get the phrasing right. In each campaign, send out a couple versions of a similar design with slight variations to one or two elements. Once you’ve distributed the materials, analyze the results and compare to see which version performed best. Then the next time you design print marketing materials, use that knowledge to inform your campaign and optimize its performance.