How To Drive More Revenue With a Direct Marketing Strategy

Can you hear that? The digital noise–emails, direct messages, ads–has become deafening. In 2023, an omnichannel marketing strategy that includes physical gifts is your secret weapon for rising above the clutter bombarding your prospects.

At best, manually sending gifts is tedious, and at worst, it’s not scalable. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could send impactful, door-opening gifts and mailers as quickly as you send an email campaign? That’s exactly what direct marketing platforms do.

Read on to learn how a scalable gifting strategy will amplify your marketing budget and ROI. You’ll learn how real-life companies use automated sending to create quality pipeline, book more meetings, and increase renewals!

How does direct marketing work?

By connecting your advanced direct marketing automation platform with your tech stack, you can systematize the sending of physical gifts and unique experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

The goal of direct marketing is to combine the pattern interruption of direct mail marketing with the data-driven, hyper-targeted capabilities of digital marketing strategies to reach new and existing accounts and increase revenue.

In a digitally cluttered world, the usual suspects—email blasts, cold calls, and mailers—are predictable and easy to ignore. Instead, direct marketing allows you to create authentic, personalized connections with your audience—at scale!

With a fully integrated direct marketing platform, your campaigns will rise above the inbox so you can reach the right person at the right moment to create a lasting impact.

Scalable sending versus traditional direct mail

Traditional direct mail

Digital sending❌

Standard gifting✅

Customizable❌

Manual and tedious✅

Quick and automated❌

Expensive✅

Scalable❌

Ambiguous✅

Trackable❌

The benefits of a modern sending strategy

On average, prospects receive 121 emails, 60 phone calls, and countless DMs—all while sitting in back-to-back meetings. That’s why taking communication offline with a gifting strategy will become your critical differentiator and your strategy for creating much-needed pattern interruptions.

1. Differentiate your revenue strategy

By streamlining the direct marketing process, your team can craft highly personalized, differentiated messages that resonate with leads and customers, resulting in higher conversion rates.

Additionally, physical gifts provide a more tangible, impactful experience that creates stronger engagement than digital mail alone. Mixing personalization with unforgettable experiences drives revenue, so you stay ahead of the competition in a crowded market.

2. Build authentic customer relationships

Receiving gifts is a great way to build strong customer relationships that lead to recurring revenue, referrals, and raving fans. However, corporate gifting strategies must be consistent to build true bonds. Mixing direct marketing into your touchpoints creates personalized, one-of-a-kind experiences for each customer, increasing engagement and loyalty.

“Brands today operate within a crowded marketplace. Consumers are surrounded by marketing, advertising, and branding messages. They are unlikely to make that initial purchase without having already built some kind of relationship with your brand. As a result, consistent brand messaging matters even before any purchase has taken place.” –Jessica Wong Founder and CEO of both Valux Digital and uPro Digital.

3. Amplify marketing investment and ROI

With a direct marketing automation platform, you’ll never question the effectiveness of your offline marketing efforts. Direct marketing gives you in-depth analytics and dashboards so you can understand how your sending strategy is affecting open and closed wins.

Using metrics like address confirmation rate, delivery rate, and influenced pipeline, you can ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing budget. For example, features like Meeting Scheduler Analytics show how eGifts sent directly influence meetings booked.

Reasons to automate your sending campaigns

1. Scaling demand generation programs

Use an automated gifting platform to incentivize webinar signups. For example, you could send your company-branded merchandise like YETI mugs and Maglite flashlights to help boost attendance. Your existing tools like Marketo will automatically confirm attendees.

You’ll segment attendees on criteria, like “Attended the webinar,” or “Have not previously received a gift for a webinar.” Next, you’ll add the leads to a Marketo campaign with verified addresses, and then your direct marketing platform will execute the gift.

2. Incentivizing prospects to take meetings with physical gifts

Depending on your industry, some prospects are already flooded with e-gift cards, so they might not cut through the noise. In these instances, you could use higher-value physical gifts like self-heating Ember mugs to garner more attention.

Encourage your sales team to send a personalized email requesting address confirmation to build a stronger rapport with prospects. With a scalable direct marketing strategy, you can track the results and trigger direct mail shipping.

3. Scaling customer touchpoints to improve account retention

Your customer success team can send $25 coffee gift cards and swag to customers who complete your required onboarding hours. When customers achieve company milestones like an IPO or an SOX compliance audit, customer success managers (CSMs) can send a wine.com eGift or customized socks (a humorous spin on“SOX”) to congratulate them.

For more clever sending ideas, download our ebook: Corporate Gifting Unwrapped: Why It’s a Must-Have in Every Economy

Scalable sending use cases

Sending success story: PatientPop generates 7-figure pipeline results

Brian Clevesy of PatientPop, the self-proclaimed “biggest non-believer in direct mail,” was one of many marketers that had hesitations about direct marketing.

However, using Sendoso, he created a direct marketing campaign that booked the most demos for PatientiPop. He used cookies as target account door openers. Clevesy did it all using less money and a smaller headcount while maintaining his lead volume and program goals around ARR and pipeline generated.

Automating revolutionized how PatientPop sourced, scaled, and leveraged direct marketing resulting in a 7-figure pipeline generated each month consistently, ultimately resulting in 292% on YTD ROI!

Sending success story: Anaplan boosts live event registrations with top-level executives

Brevan Peavey, ABM senior specialist at Anaplan was tasked with increasing deal acceleration and engagement with prospects. Sending one-off swag to top-level executives just wasn’t scalable.

“We’re trying to reach executives at Fortune 500 companies,” explained Peavey. “It’s not that easy. You’ve got an executive assistant who is gatekeeping everything.”

The ABM team used Sendoso, a series of integrations, and strategic gift choices to invite 400 people to the Executive Experience at Anaplan Live. They targeted top VIPs with personalized figurines to drive registrations. The response was strong, with registrations exceeding the team’s goal by 150%.

How to automate your direct marketing strategy

Finally, you can stop sending out batch direct mail, storing it on site, managing it with spreadsheets, and waiting months until it’s delivered. There’s a new class of digitally-enabled direct marketing solutions. You can launch physical gifts and mailers immediately to meet each recipient’s needs.

Here’s how to execute your sending strategy:

1. Target key people and accounts.

If you don’t have an ABM platform yet, creating your first account list can be challenging. LinkedIn is a logical place to start. Depending on the LinkedIn plan you have, you can set up search criteria and filter prospects based on industry, keyword, and size. Most CRMs will even allow you to link your LinkedIn so qualified leads directly feed into sales lead lists.

Easily customize and trigger sends from within your existing account-based workflow with just a few clicks using an existing ABM platform like Terminus, 6Sense, Demandbase, Bombora, and RollWorks.

2. Leverage marketplace expertise

One of the most challenging parts of a direct marketing strategy can be knowing which gifts to send. That’s why it’s critical to partner with a provider that stores and manages all gift inventory in worldwide fulfillment centers, so you don’t have to handle anything manually.

Upgrade your sending strategy by accessing a globally curated marketplace that includes eGifts, physical gifts, branded merchandise, virtual experiences, and philanthropy. Bonus if they have a community of experts to help you with gift curation, onboarding, and customer success.

3. Track connections with your existing tools

Just as you measure conversion rates and qualified leads, you’ll be able to see how many sends occurred within an account, the type of gifts sent, and how much they cost. Increased visibility into ROI allows you to replicate those results across your other target accounts.

Conclusion

Whether you want to grow the pipeline and engage target accounts, or drive renewals and upsells, automating your corporate gifting strategy will help you send impactful, door-opening gifts and mailers as easily as hitting ‘send’ on an email campaign.

You’ll increase conversion rates by crafting highly personalized emails that resonate with leads and customers. Gifts provide a more tangible experience that elicits stronger engagement than digital mail alone.

With the right tools, setting up a sending strategy is simple. Start by targeting key people and accounts, leverage a robust corporate gifting marketplace, and then integrate your sends with your tracking tools so you can ensure your strategy is producing ROI.

Looking for ways to stand out, gain the attention of their buying committees, and stay top of mind with your prospects?

Learn how direct marketing automation platforms accelerate sales cycles in this study from GTM Partners.