Listen up, all you digital marketers and commercial printers. You need each other.

By combining a digital campaign with a direct mail component, you can give people a memorable, meaningful experience. The result? Business growth, word-of-mouth buzz, great press, increased loyalty, and brand awareness.

Not too shabby.

Recently I attended the annual NEDMA Conference on the campus of Bentley University. The session by Harry Gold, CEO & Managing Partner of Overdrive Interactive, blew me away.

If only more printers had been there. The ones who were there must’ve been as psyched as I was.

Harry’s session was called “Digital & Direct Mail: Turning the Virtual into the Physical with Marketing Automation.” I loved it.

In a nutshell, he shared a few examples of how Overdrive helped companies get peoples’ attention and increase sales by using marketing automation to trigger a direct mail component.

There was that gorgeous Harley Davidson social catalog that his company created from a social crowdsourcing campaign. Owners were invited to send in photos of themselves with their Harleys. Thousands of images were sent in and then used to create the photo mosaic. People could order their copy of the catalog from the website. Just a beautiful printed piece.

Participants could go to the site and zoom into their own photo – which they did by the thousands – and, of course, they shared it. “The share is an important action in social media,” he added. And the repurchase rate over 24 months for the mosaic group vs. others was much higher.

Another case study that illustrated using direct mail effectively was the “Sweet Tweets” campaign for Bazooka brands. This was a social sampling program for Bazooka Candy, which was launching a new product called Sweet Tweets but couldn’t get it on the store shelves.

Overdrive’s campaign to sell the candy (basically a piece of candy attached to a little post-it note), was seriously clever. The target audience was moms, who could write something on the note and add it to their kids’ lunch boxes. (Wish I’d had some when Jacob was little.)

So Overdrive devised a social sampling program (new term for me; love it), where folks asked for it online, and they would then get a sample through the mail. This was a perfect example of blending direct mail fulfillment with a digital experience.

(Anyone else remember sending in Bazooka wrappers back in the ‘60s to get sea monkeys and X-ray glasses?)

A video was created to help sell the Sweet Tweets by showing consumers how to use it.
And there was an online form for people to fill out if they wanted to send someone a Sweet Tweet for free.

The result: an online social sharing campaign used marketing automation to create an offline, delightful experience.

This campaign was multi faceted and involved a Facebook campaign as well a Twitter element. All of the campaign stages are covered in the case study on Overdrive’s site. Again, the share was vital. The campaign basically forced the share; it was step #3 in the FB campaign for Sweet Tweets, having people trade a share for something they’d get in the mail.

One of the coolest things about this campaign? It was done on a shoestring budget.

So marketers should think about direct mail and sampling when appropriate. Find creative ways to get people to ask for your sample or, like Bazooka, get people to send your sample to someone else, in a social environment. This campaign is a great example of using social with direct mail.

If you’re a printer, how could you use this information to help your customers? Why not come up with an idea that would marry a direct mail element with a digital campaign? How could you help customers turn a virtual campaign into a physical reward? How could marketers make digital work better with a physical component?

Harry’s session gave me new insights on marketing automation and how powerful it can be for a brand. Many of today’s innovative marketing companies have automated tools with “sockets that plug into print on demand,” he remarked. And since direct mail still has a higher deliverability rate than email, why not marry the two?

And the digital bride and analog groom lived happily ever after.

P.S. Thanks, Harry! Great stuff.

©2014 Margie Dana. All rights reserved.