Connecting with customers in today’s environment is harder than ever. As your competition turns to a digital-only strategy, this is your opportunity to stand out with a more personal and memorable touch by using direct email to send something tactile and physical rather than only another email.
Wondering how to send mail when most of your target audience is suddenly working from home?
PFL and Oracle Eloqua are working to help our customers adjust to the new environment. Here are several strategies to consider:
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Using sales development representative/business development representative (SDR/BDR) resources to find and confirm mailing addresses before sends
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Collecting preferred mailing addresses as part of your Oracle Eloqua campaigns
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Appending home address data with a data service
PFL’s internal BDR team stopped sending swag in outreach sequences at the beginning of the pandemic. Our heavy phone and email outreach led to a measly 0.9% meeting booked rate. When we went back to tactile marketing automation, our reply rates doubled and we had a 10x increase in meetings booked. In fact, 22% of prospects who confirmed their address booked a meeting.
We also tested sending direct mail to prospects even if they didn’t confirm their address. That resulted in an eight percent conversion rate. So, your meeting conversion rate will be better if you get prospects to opt-in, but sending mail regardless is still much better than the 0.9% conversion rate we saw with only email and phone calls.
You can also layer preferred address collection into your Oracle Eloqua nurture campaigns.
Bearing all this in mind, we built our Tactile Marketing Automation nurture campaign.
Step one: Craft your message and contentOur strategy was to send our unused trade show swag (a playful pack of marketing meme cards with a tiny display easel). We’re hoping that it will brighten our prospects’ days and illustrate a way they can keep their goals on track despite trade show cancellations. For our call to action, we asked prospects to take a meeting with the sales rep named on the personalized note card.
If you don’t have trade show swag on hand, consider sending products that support your message or aid your prospect’s sudden transition to a home office. Some ideas include collateral (an ebook or whitepaper), sticky notes, headset, socks, tumblers, pens, and other highly useful branded goods.
Step two: Plan your touchpointsMultichannel marketing is a must for our team at PFL. Our multichannel marketing report with Demand Metric found that response rates go up with the number of channels used.
Here’s how we structured our multichannel ABM campaign:
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Target contacts receive warmup emails and web ads. We created four emails, but if a recipient takes the call to action early in the sequence, the emails stop automatically.
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The emails and ads drive contacts to a web form to collect the preferred address. (More on this in Step 4.)
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Form completion triggers the send of direct mail in the Oracle Eloqua campaign. We print, package, and ship the package on-demand.
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Once the contact receives the package, our business development reps (BDRs) receive notice of delivery within 15 minutes thanks to PFL’s Tactile Marketing Automation software integration with FedEx. The BDR then makes a timely call, increasing the opportunity for a live connection by up to 20%.
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If needed after the follow-up call, the contact will enter a follow-up sequence including additional emails and calls.
We started our list with 2019 and 2020 event registrants and attendees that fit our ideal customer profile (ICP). Then, we segmented the list to identify target prospects not associated with an opportunity. We built the audience in Oracle Eloqua with an email address list.
Step four: Build your web form to collect preferred addressesAt present, the best strategy is to collect preferred addresses for one-time use only. Consumers are understandably sensitive to sharing their home addresses. We want to be clear that we’re sending something fun and that we will use their preferred address just one time. After shipment of direct mail, we’ll delete the address.
To avoid overwriting our contact’s business mailing addresses in our CRM, we created a new set of preferred address fields in Oracle Eloqua.
Necessary information to capture:
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First Name
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Last Name
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Email
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Address 1
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City
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State
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Postal Code
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Country
Next, we created the campaign in Oracle Eloqua.
- Once we placed the PFL direct mail step in the campaign we configure the mapping of the contact objects in order to know where to deliver the direct mail kit. We also pull dynamic information from Oracle Eloqua to personalize the printed piece.
- When a prospect completes the form, the direct mail is triggered, and our meme easel and personalized note are fulfilled and shipped by our lovely manufacturing co-workers.
This strategy gets us up and running fast with a preferred address campaign in Oracle Eloqua.
In a digital marketing world, sending out a direct mail piece can pique someone’s attention. It’s worth a try to see if it can help you out leave a strong, positive impression with customers who see email after email every day.
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