Today’s financial institutions have a larger portfolio of offerings and customer incentives than ever before, from interest rate promotions on new and refinanced loans and mortgages to credit card reward programs and much more. But with customers increasingly banking online rather than visiting their financial institution and forming a personal relationship with their banker, the challenge of promoting these offerings is also growing. Today’s customers typically are too busy to take phone calls, even from their banker, and their email inboxes are too packed for your e-blast to stand out.
The answer is personalized direct mail. This highly effective marketing tool continues to deliver results year after year. Multiple surveys show that more people recall a brand after opening a personalized direct mail piece about it than after viewing a digital ad online.
By utilizing Southeastern’s cutting-edge data analytics and complex transactional mail processing, combined with our seamless BoomBox mailing services, direct mail will become one of your company’s most valuable marketing assets. Our high-speed inserter boosts productivity and efficiency by handling up to 26,000 pieces of letter mail per hour.
Here are seven ways your financial institution can benefit from direct mail marketing.
Top 7 Ways Financial Institutions Benefit from Personalized Direct Mail
1. Trust. Many bank customers receive their monthly financial statements in the mail. They recognize their financial institution’s logo, font and color palette, giving them the confidence that the envelope’s contents are genuine. Unfortunately, thanks to today’s ubiquitous digital scams, customers do not always trust their email to the same degree. With direct mail, you can leverage the trust your customer already has in your brand’s printed mailings.
2. Variety. Unlike a one-size-fits-all email blast, direct mail is available in a variety of formats and can be customized to suit the particular program or incentive. Some of the different mailing pieces Southeastern can create for you include:
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- Personalized letters explaining your promotion in detail
- Postcards with high-quality, eye-catching copy and graphics
- Self-mailers enabling the customer to accept your offer to your by return mail
- Buck slips that add another touch point to your campaign.
3. Lead Generation. In addition to creating attention-getting direct mail pieces for your existing clients, the Southeastern team can use advanced data analytics to help you identify potential new clients. We can help you to create a targeted mailing list of prospects by sorting databases for key demographics like age and income level.
4. Personalization. The ability to identify highly qualified individual prospects can be wasted if the company sends them each an identical mailing, however. At Southeastern, we will use high-speed variable data printing to customize multiple datapoints in your direct mail piece. Not only can you address each letter or postcard to a customer’s first name, but you also can personalize it with copy and imagery tailored to appeal to that specific individual.
5. Multiple Touch Points. With a direct mail campaign, you can enclose more than one mailing piece in an envelope – something email cannot do. For example, you might promote an interest rate promotion or credit card offer in a personalized letter and enclose a buck slip highlighting its benefits. You might also include a self-mailer for the customer to check off and mail back. If you are using our BoomBox suite of services, you can add another touch point via Social Match, which matches Facebook and Instagram accounts to your mailing list, then delivers social media ads to those feeds during your direct mail campaign. And by integrating with the U.S. Post Office’s Informed Delivery®, which emails recipients a preview of mail in their mailbox, BoomBox adds a further touch point with the customer.
6. Trackability. Another key benefit of direct mail is the ease and effectiveness with which we can track it. At Southeastern, we will let you know when your mailing pieces hits mailboxes and provide you with delivery lists – right down to individual mail pieces. Using our BoomBox technology, we also can record every call that results from a direct mail campaign, capturing the customer’s contact and demographic information. In turn, you can use that data to send a follow-up postcard or other mailing piece to keep the conversation going!
7. Compliance. At Southeastern, we understand the extreme importance of legal and regulatory compliance, including HIPAA-mandated security measures. Our company is HITRUST-compliant and will be fully certified by Q2 2024.
Trusted by financial institutions and their customers, direct mail holds the key to forming relationships and keeping lines of communication open in today’s hectic business environment.
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