How to Get Your Brand Message Back in Front of Past Website Visitors – Without Digital Ads

…before they buy from a competitor.

And although average response rates are relatively low at 0.7% CTR, profitability is good – making digital retargeting an important tool for maximizing awareness and profit for 77% of online businesses.

What They Don’t See, They Can’t Click

Most businesses make the mistake of simply writing off these potential customers as unreachable – and not wanting to be reached anyway.

But the good news is that neither is true.

Consumers don’t actually hate ALL ads – 83% of them just wish that they could just filter out the “really obnoxious” ads that ruin the user experience.

Unfortunately for online shoppers, such an online ad filtering tool doesn’t exist – which is why most online shoppers block, look away from, and opt out of digital ads.

So what’s a growth-minded retargeter to do?

The Non-Obnoxious Path

…and that also reaches your other website visitors who do receive your digital ads – but just don’t respond to them. It’s a retargeting tool that perfectly complements and backs up your existing digital retargeting effort.

Not surprisingly, the solution doesn’t involve sending a single digital retargeting ad.

This advertising channel solution leverages your online website visitor data, and executes the retargeting to the past website visitors with offline advertising – with Direct Mail ads.

It’s also because brands can diversify and create an omni-channel retargeting program – which increases customer convenience on how they can re-engage with you, and enhances the customer’s connection to your brand – with Direct Mail ads that impact a customer’s decision-making 35% more than with digital engagement.

The Five Fundamentals – No. 1

There are Five Fundamentals to creating an offline “Direct Mail Retargeting” machine that get your brand message back in front of your desired past website visitors, but I’m only going to give you the first two right now – because they will determine whether you qualify to transform your single-channel retargeting program into a omni-channel beast.

I’m going to give you the first Fundamental, and this quickly will help you see if your online business qualifies to be able to generate a second source of past website visitors that literally can double your number of retargeting conversions every month.

The biggest mistake many growth marketers make is getting pulled in by the Shiny Marketing Object Syndrome for cool new programs or trends that just aren’t a good fit – as definitely cool and supposedly profitable as they may be.

And since the fit isn’t good, the business never gets the stellar results that the demo made look so easy to get. They simply never get traction because something is “off” – and 99% of the time, it’s the fit.

There are important metrics that your business should be meeting to qualify as being a good fit with a data-driven, offline Direct Mail Retargeting program that gets traction – so let’s dive in.

AOV + LCV + MUV = Success

The first Fundamental you need to size up is your size – whether your business has the Average Order Value (AOV), Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) and Monthly Unique Visitors (MUV) needed to drive valuable-enough visitors back to your site at a scale that makes the whole shebang worthwhile.

We’ve found that a brand should have an Average Order Value of $70+, a Customer Lifetime Value of $300+, and a minimum of 3,000 Monthly Unique Visitors to be a good fit for Direct Mail ads. These aren’t absolute – but definitely cover the 80/20 of successful Direct Mail Retargeting programs.

AOV is always an important KPI and benchmark to gauge customer purchase behavior. But you have to recall that with retargeting you’re usually acquiring a new customer – so ask yourself: how much is acquiring this new customer really worth to our business and its future?

That’s where Lifetime Customer Value comes in to play… which is perhaps an even more important measure of the value of bringing each incremental customer into your fold. Most businesses prosper not from the margin on the first transaction when it acquires a new customer, but on their subsequent purchases over time that come at a much lower cost.

What A Good Fit Looks Like

Now that you understand the first Fundamental of profitable Direct Mail Retargeting and the appropriate levels of the three KPI predictors of a great fit, let’s check out this client profile…

We have 16 Case Studies from various industries detailed for your perusal – so you can see how other businesses with a similar “good fit” profile to yours have already been successful.

The Five Fundamentals – No. 2

In the second of the Five Fundamentals, you’re about to learn what type of data approach best feeds your customer-generating Direct Mail Retargeting machine. The mistake that some make is they choose a Direct Mail Retargeting program that has an IP-based data approach – that can often be challenged to generate accurate, privacy-compliant postal addresses in volume.

That’s because IP-based data approaches rely on an approximate latitude and longitude to identify the website visitor’s geographic location.

The approximate lat/long is really a radius around the website visitor’s geographic location – which can be large enough to encompass more than one postal address. The data system’s challenge is how to choose which of those multiple addresses IS the identified website visitor… or whether that’s even possible to do – which, if not, can mean that retargeting opportunity is lost forever.

Another problem is how to accurately match a website visitor to the correct address at any multi-unit building like apartments or condos – which have many unique postal addresses located under a single (lat/long) roof. In short, it’s not possible… so those website visitors are usually lost as well.

Who Doesn’t Love Cookies

Instead of an IP-based data approach, you want to make sure your Direct Mail Retargeting provider utilizes a 1st-party, cookie-based approach for your website visitor postal address matching. We all know that cookies are tags associated with a user’s browser and device – and are unique to them. Since they’re also easily encrypted, this data approach ensures your retargeting program uses privacy compliant data with the highest Address match rates possible.

This allows you to be confident that you’re connecting with your actual past website visitors.

In developing our Direct Mail Retargeting solution, we tested both IP-based and 1^st-party cookie-based data approaches.

We analyzed the accuracy of matched addresses, yield of matched addresses out of the total website visitors, and address completeness – and the results weren’t even close. The 1^st-party, cookie-based approach yielded over 50% more correctly identified addresses that met USPS standards for completeness and deliverability.

One Lane or Two?

If you’ve seen that your business is a good fit in the three key KPIs above and make sure your provider utilizes a 1^st-party, cookie-based data approach…

Direct Mail Retargeting can be a clever, convenient and cost-effective way for your business to finally reach the other half of website visitors that actively avoid your digital ads – AND to give you an invaluable second chance with those who are receiving your digital ads but aren’t motivated by that channel to respond.

Your retargeting program is like a road that leads website visitors back to your site. With your digital retargeting program, it’s currently a one-lane road.

Direct Mail Retargeting can make yours a two-lane road, with a plentiful second source of past visitors heading back to your website that can more than double your retargeting customers and conversions.

So at this point, you may be wondering…

How big is my website’s opportunity to access these unreachable website visitors?

We’ve built a Lost Opportunity Calculator to help you easily figure that out.

Click the button to download the Calculator PDF (no email required) – and discover the number of lost website visitors your business could reach by diversifying your retargeting program.

Simply enter your business’ Unique Monthly Visitors and website Conversion Rate to customize it to your business’ profile.

The numbers make it plain to see why Direct Mail Retargeting has become one of the fastest-growing new marketing tools for online businesses today.