2 Biggies That Make Snailmail Intelligent with Intelisent
Last week at the DMA‘s Digital Marketing Days, The Marketing Consigliere was curious about what technologies there were to improve traditional “non-technical” direct marketing. Sadly enough, many of the exhibitors involved in printing looked sort of embarrassed when they were asked if they were involved with “variable data printing.” Another SWAG vendor offering custom logo printing on just about anything with a surface had not ever used Twitter, confusing it with Facebook as a “toy for teenagers.” But one of the refreshing stops he made was at a booth where there’s a Connecticut based company that is intelligently helping maintain the value of direct mail…
There is a company called Intelisent that helps you optimize your direct mail campaigns. Lisa Bowes was staffing their booth and graciously explained to The Marketing Consigliere what Intelisent was all about and it did not take long for the proverbial light bulb to go off in his head. Here are two major reasons why, if you depend on direct mail for your marketing success, to consider Intelisent for helping you with campaign management.
1. Work with better customer data.
One of the quickest things to do to bolster return on your Marketing dollar is to mail to the correct prospects/customers and mitigate the costs associated with undeliverable addresses. Remember, before there was email bounceback, there were “dead letters,” which have always added to the cost of direct mail campaigns. Letters can be undeliverable for many reasons: insufficient address; addressee is deceased; maybe they refused delivery; no such number, no such street, etc. Intelisent’s platform is gives you visibility with the US Postal Service’s Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMB)system. The IMB integrates the POSTNET barcode, the National Change of Address Service (ACS) and the PLANET Code (Postal Alpha Numeric Encoding Technique) barcode information into one unified system. Intelisent embeds a unique code into the IMB to track each piece, and knows as soon as the Postal Service knows about any inability to deliver a piece of mail, and why. Your ability to swiftly append your database will save you money in the long run.
2. Know the timing of your postal deliveries to optimize other communications with customers.
Lisa explained that campaigns sometimes have regional hiccups due to post office inefficiencies. Sometimes a flyer arrives too late for the recipient to act upon a sale or other worthy offer. Sometimes a salesperson follows up too late because a piece arrived sooner than later. With the ability to track when a direct mail piece arrives at a local post office, you have a better idea of estimating when it will be ultimately delivered and read. While no system can track to the “last mile” all the way to the recipient’s mailbox, this is still much better than how it was done in the past. You do not want to waste a customer’s time nor do you want to waste a sales person’s time calling that customer if the messaging is off schedule.
Intellisent clearly has a tool that helps Marketers better act upon data – the two benefits that The Marketing Consigliere sees in Intelisent’s solution is that it helps make your demand generation direct mail less of a “shotgun” approach and aligns a traditional marketing function more with the Net-Centric Marketing world by giving your team metrics & measurement that allow for optimization.