The 10 Best Direct Mail Marketing Companies of 2021: Comparison Guide
KEY POINTS
- Does direct mail marketing still work?
- List of the 10 top direct mail companies to use.
- How to pick the best direct mail company for your business.
Direct mail was once the king of driving leads to businesses. But now that the internet has taken over, we find email and digital marketing have taken their place. The question now—is direct mail marketing really dead?
The simple answer—no.
Email overload is all too real and high-profile data privacy scandals have driven savvy digital marketers to consider offline marketing tactics.
While direct mail marketing is a traditional marketing channel, it still delivers huge returns on investments (sometimes better than digital marketing methods).
To succeed in the direct mail marketing space, you’ll need a dedicated direct mail marketing service. These services print, stamp and deliver your brochures, postcards, or flyers. Some services go further to provide design templates and help you create a list of viable mailing addresses.
In this post, we’ll discuss the top direct mail marketing companies to consider. But first, let’s talk a little more about why you should use them.
Does Direct Mail Marketing Still Work?
Direct mail is a cost-effective way to get your brand’s message and offer directly in front of your prospects and customers. However, not every marketer’s aware of the resurgence in direct mail ROI.
Consider the following direct mail statistics:
- The customer response rate increased by 43% in 2016.
- The median return on investment (ROI) for direct mail is 29% compared to 23% and 16% for paid search and online display respectively.
- Direct mail response rates are 5.3% and 2.9% for mail sent to houses and prospect lists respectively while email has a response rate of 0.6% and an average click-through rate of 2% or 3%.
For any serious marketer, these figures show direct mail is still a game-changer, and a flexible addition to their larger marketing strategy.
Which Direct Mail Marketing Companies Can I Use?
Incorporating direct mail into your marketing campaigns is a great way to strengthen relationships with your customers and prospects. This is because direct mail allows you to provide hyper-focused content and foster deeper connections compared to using email alone.
Here are the top direct mail companies you can use:
1. Gunderson Direct
Having sent more than 1.5 billion pieces of mail, Gunderson Direct knows a little something about making mail work for its clients. The company goes beyond providing direct mail services to offering strategic partnerships that allow you to continuously iterate and improve your marketing campaigns.
From its almost two decades of experience, Gunderson Direct provides proven, strategic expertise and creative thought leadership to put together winning programs that get responses.
The service leverages its vast network of data providers to ensure that your mail reaches the right audience for your product and service.
Gunderson Direct also simplifies the production and mailing process so you can depend on them to produce high-quality mail within your budget and timelines.
The company’s data team also measures each campaign and provides insightful, performance-focused analytics to help you create high-quality mailers.
2. PsPrint
PsPrint offers top-quality, budget-friendly and dependable direct mail marketing services. The company allows you to manage all your custom printing services for a wide range of direct mail products online. Just pick your product, upload your artwork, and attach your mailing list.
If you don’t have a mailing list, PsPrint can get you one in less than 15 minutes. Just answer a few questions based on your target audience’s demographics like age, ZIP Code and income.
The service offers a quick turnaround of two to five days once your order has been printed. They’ll even send you additional prints that weren’t mailed out, and if they fit into one box, you get them for free.
Besides products, PsPrint offers mail list processing (inkjet addressing, CASS certification and postal resorting), die cutting and foil stamping.
If you don’t have a design background or an employee in your marketing team that can design for you, PsPrint’s graphic designers can help you get the exact look that you want.
3. Cactus Mailing
Cactus Mailing is a simple direct mail marketing company that offers design, printing and mailing services. While Cactus Mailing lacks a design tool like other options on the market, you can upload your own designs and use targeted mailing lists to fast-track your marketing strategy.
The service also provides direct mail brochures and expert printing services for promotional brochures. These are particularly popular with multiple establishments including restaurants, real estate, and retail businesses.
One of the unique things about Cactus Mailing is its Smart Marketing concept. This feature combines direct mail marketing materials with digital tools like landing pages and Google display ads to improve your campaign results.
If you opt for the combined service, Cactus Mailing offers discounts and a free, no-obligation direct mail marketing plan.
Cactus Mailing’s marketing experts are also available to help you increase brand awareness and boost sales for your business.
4. MailShark
MailShark works like an extension of your in-house marketing team as it handles everything from design to printing and mailing for your marketing campaign. You can also use MailShark to print your promotional materials and have them delivered to your own address.
Apart from the above, the company offers targeted direct mailing, saturation mailing lists, Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM), new mover mailing program, and free design services.
MailShark’s direct mail and printing experts provide professional guidance for an effortless direct mail marketing campaign.
In addition, the company creates custom direct mail marketing solutions that suit your needs and budget, while increasing your sales. This way, you can focus more on your business and less on time-consuming marketing efforts.
5. Vistaprint
If you’re looking for a direct mail marketing solution that doesn’t need you to sign any contracts or make payments upfront, Vistaprint is worth considering.
The company is known as a business card creator but offers a direct mail marketing service. You can choose from over 4000 templates to create your postcard designs or work with Vistaprint’s in-house design team to make the task easier.
If you don’t have a mailing list to send your designs to, you can buy Vistaprint’s highly targeted mailing lists. These lists are based on demographic data and target both regular consumers and businesses.
Some of the Vistaprint features we like include faster turnaround times, a dedicated in-house design team, drag-and-drop designing platform, dual printing facilities, and 24-hour customer support.
The only drawback with Vistaprint is that it provides direct mail service for only postcards. If you want to send other printed items, you’ll have to arrange for delivery yourself.
6. PostcardMania
Whether you’re just starting out with direct mail marketing or you’re an expert in targeted mailers, you can’t go wrong with PostcardMania.
The company lets you target the most qualified prospects with postcard mailings and optional matching ads on social media platforms.
You can choose from a wide range of customization options for your campaign and benefit from PostcardMania’s speedy production and shipping times.
Plus, its robust tracking system gives you a glimpse into how your customers react to your marketing campaigns so you can iterate and improve for better results.
You also get to choose between uploading your own designs or hiring PostCardMania’s in-house team to create something for you.
The design process takes anywhere from two to four days depending on the complexity of the design. This way, you can make an unlimited number of revisions and have ample time to perfect your message before anything goes to print.
PostcardMania also has a quick average turnaround of three to four weeks for your campaign to be printed and shipped.
7. Next Day Flyers
If you need a direct mail marketing service for your high-volume mailing campaigns, Next Day Flyers can handle that. The company can quickly turn around campaigns with up to 100,000 mailers including brochures, postcards, and mail rack cards.
Plus, they have two production facilities on either coast – California and New Jersey. This way, the company can print and send mailers quickly to any mailbox across the country.
Next Day Flyers has a quick turnaround time of approximately four days, though some orders are completed the same day they’re received.
The company can ship your entire campaign from its in-house postal service. If you don’t want Next Day Flyers to fulfill and mail your campaign, you can pick up your order from any of its locations if you’re close to the pickup points.
Next Day Flyers can also help you design your mailer. You can choose the cardstock, size, coating, and fold style, then discuss your campaign with their in-house graphic designers via email.
The design services aren’t included with your order, so you’ll pay an extra fee for that and get your design after 24 hours. Each order goes through a quality assurance check before shipping and you’ll get free proof to ensure that the mailer matches your specifications.
Next Day Flyers also rent out their targeted mailing lists so you can select households using several demographic data points to create a more focused marketing campaign. If you provide your own mailing list, the company will verify the addresses on your behalf so you can save on postage.
8. SaasMQL
Unlike other direct mail marketing companies that target any type of business in general, SaasMQL focuses on helping SaaS businesses reach out to potential customers.
The service combines online and offline channels, leveraging direct mail as the primary channel to convert initial engagements into discovery calls and opportunities.
SaasMQL integrates with your sales funnels to trigger a direct mail sequence for the right prospect or customer at the right time. The integrated campaign funnel combines direct mail, ads, and email into a well-timed and consistent workflow.
Their approach is unique in that they deliver packages to prospects for marketing. This way, you’re able to make a better impression compared to sending letters in the mail.
Using SaasMQL’s direct mail service gives you access to targeted direct mail campaigns, analytics, SaaS-focused demand generation, and campaign ROI in Salesforce.
9. Modern Postcard
Since 1992, Modern Postcard has been providing high quality targeted mailing lists, in-house mailing services and printing for small, mid-market and enterprise businesses.
The company prints postcards, calendars, booklets, business cards, tri-folds, letters, specialty die-cuts, presentation folders and more.
Along with their complete in-house direct mail service, the company offers direct mail retargeting, which lets you automatically send postcards to lost website visitors.
A dedicated in-house team is available to deliver a quality experience for you. The team personally works with each client, providing expert services in postcard marketing, design, printing and direct mail advertising.
Plus, Modern Postcard’s streamlined system and postal analytics help you spend less on each mailing while ensuring that your campaign goes out on time and on budget.
10. Sendoso
Sendoso delivers modern direct mail, personalized gifts, and other Physical Impressions at scale. We provide custom boxes or video mailers to help you build brand awareness and create demand, making it impossible for prospects to ignore.
Sendoso simplifies the delivery of direct mail by sending relevant and desirable physical and digital experiences that keep prospects interested in your brand throughout the sales funnel. For instance, you can send a printed analyst report or success story whenever your prospects hit a particular stage in the sales funnel.
Sendoso’s unique Address Confirmation concept allows you to reach customers who are working remotely.
With this feature, we email an offer to your recipients, who then confirm the address they want the packages sent to.
Pick the Best Direct Mail Service For Your Business
With so many direct mail marketing companies on the market today, selecting the best among them can be tough. These 10 providers rose to the top of the pack by providing high-quality products, quick turnaround times, in-house services and analytics to help you improve your campaigns.
Learn more from our Direct Mail Marketing: Complete Guide to find out about direct mail examples, strategies, personalization, best practices, and more. Curious about Sendoso, the Leading Sending Platform, for your direct mail marketing approach? Request a demo today to see if we might be a good fit.
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