Digital Direct Mail: First-Party Onboarding at Scale

First-Party Onboarding with Reach and Deterministic Attribution

While the lines between offline and online marketing have increasingly blurred, not all marketing budgets have moved to reflect it. The macro-economic pressure for marketers to go digital continues to drive significant growth in search, display, social, and mobile. However, a lack of transparency in digital audience composition and vague measurement capabilities allow television and postal direct mail to maintain legacy market shares.

Mobile advertising spend is expected to surpass television in 2019 while at the same time, postal costs increasingly make direct mail a tier-two marketing option. Nevertheless, brand marketers stick with these tactics because there are proven metrics that correlate a TV media buy or a postcard with a return on investment.

Direct mail excels in transparency and accuracy when delivering a message to the right person at the right time. Knowing a consumer’s household allows for verified descriptors such as income, family composition, and purchase histories to be used to make informed decisions about personalization and ability to transact. Mailing lists from reputable data providers offer tailored, known audiences at any level of geography with near 100% deliverability.

Television effectively positions itself as direct mail through your television set — at scale. Networks know exactly where the signals are being viewed and by whom. Established measurement tactics like IMDb, Q-Scores, and Nielsen Ratings reinforce the idea that TV is a transparent and quantifiable medium.

Marketers understand the benefits of digital targeting. They just want to be able to measure it.

To bridge this offline-online gap, Semcasting Smart Zones® was designed to work just like digital direct mail. Smart Zones is a patented IP Targeting technology that connects offline locations — from your list or from our compiled data file of 264 million people and 23 million businesses — to their online delivery points on static networks and mobile devices.

CRM files or mailing lists can be onboarded at an average 80–95% rate. This records match is persistent; a mailing address can be deterministically connected to an ad impression, a website visit, a purchase, and in many cases to a store visit. Matching a known person to website or mobile activity ensures that every audience remains transparent throughout the sales process. Audience members can be matched back to their location and marketing engagements during and after the campaign.

Learn more about how Semcasting provides a digital direct mail solution by downloading our Matchback and Attribution data sheet.