Despite the immense growth of digital marketing efforts, direct mail still stands its ground in being an effective marketing tool especially when it comes to event marketing. But how do you leverage your direct mail campaign to ensure event marketing success? In this article we reveal all, helping you ensure your invites not only reach your audience but also persuade them to attend.

Event marketing relies heavily on creating buzz and driving attendance, making the integration of physical mail a crucial step in a comprehensive omnichannel strategy. By using tangible mailers alongside digital outreach, you not only increase brand recall but also create a clear, measurable pathway for simple online registration and follow-up engagement.

• Why is direct mail important for event marketing?
• How to leverage direct mail for event marketing
• Benefits of direct mail in event marketing
• Direct mail for event marketing with DMS

Why is Direct Mail Important for Event Marketing?

With the digital world being so encompassing, it can be difficult and expensive to cut through the masses, especially when it comes to event promotion. Emails can get lost in cluttered inboxes, and social media adverts are often quickly scrolled past. Direct mail, however, offers a tangible, more personal way to reach a target audience, which has been proven to lead to significantly higher engagement rates. The latest figures show that 77% of all mail is read, looked at, or glanced at, with the average piece of direct mail generating 133 seconds of attention across a 28-day period. This high engagement rate, especially when you are sending a targeted mailshot, ensures your event invitation cuts through the noise.

Direct mail can be used to reach existing and new customers and often evokes a sense of nostalgia in recipients, particularly for invites, making your event stand out from the crowd. The ability of mail to complement your digital strategy is unmatched. Recipients will feel special and valued that they have been sent a physical invite to an event and are more likely to engage with the mailer. In addition, direct mail has impressive staying power, with research showing it is kept in homes for an average of 17 days, significantly longer than a fleeting digital ad. This extended lifespan provides multiple opportunities for brand exposure and discussion within the household.

How to Leverage Direct Mail for Event Marketing

To leverage direct mail for event marketing success, it’s important to understand a few factors.

1. Define Your Objectives

Make sure your objective is well-defined and clear before you start creating your direct mailer. Know what your call to action will be and what you want your recipients to do, whether that be RSVP-ing, signing up for an event online or buying a ticket.

2. Understand Your Audience

A deep understanding of your audience, their needs, pain points, likes, demographics and interests is the key to a successful direct mail campaign, especially for events. Segment your audience and provide them with personalised and relevant messaging.

3. Craft Your Message

Your message is at the heart of your campaign so it should be clear, compelling and actionable. A strong headline will capture attention and the CTA should ensure your recipients know what to do.

4. Get Designing

The design is an important part of leveraging your mailer for success. Ensure it is visually appealing, using high-quality images and is consistent with your brand. Personalising your mailer is also a great way to improve engagement. The key to maximising visual impact is to use high-quality techniques like digital printing, which allows for photo-quality images and true variable data printing. Before you send any large volume, leverage the cost-saving benefits of bulk postage options to maximise your budget.

When it comes to the types of direct mail you can use for your event marketing campaign, there are lots of options. The most common types include:

• Postcards
• Brochures
• Invites
• Dimensional Mailers
• Gift Boxes

Format and Interactivity

The choice of format can drastically impact an event's success. While postcards and brochures are standard, consider using creative mailer formats that boost response rates like dimensional mailers or unique packaging. This is especially true for high-value B2B events, where a physical ‘unboxing’ experience, perhaps incorporating a small giveaway via sample distribution mailing, creates immediate memorability. By giving the recipient a physical item, you reinforce the value of the event. Furthermore, campaigns that incorporate direct mail with digital media see a 118% lift in response rate, highlighting the power of a combined approach that uses QR codes and PURLs to bridge the physical invite with online registration.

5. Confirm Your Mailing List

When you’re ready to send your direct mail campaign, confirm your mailing list. You could use unaddressed mail tactics, purchased data or your own database - just make sure you are compliant with GDPR. Furthermore, ensuring how clean is your data is vital. All data should be cleaned and checked for errors before sending to ensure a high deliverability rate and that the mailers are being sent to the relevant audience, often via highly efficient inkjet addressing for personalised details.

6. Confirm the Campaign Timeline

Timing is everything when it comes to direct mail especially when promoting an event. Sending it too last minute can mean recipients already have plans, but sending it too early could mean they forget about it by the time it comes around. Therefore finding the sweet spot between the two is key.

It’s also a good idea to not just rely on one mailer to promote the event. Instead, check in with your audience in the form of reminders in the run-up so that they don’t forget and also to catch any last-minute ticket sales. A post-event follow-up can also be a great way to improve the customer experience and gain any feedback about the event.

7. Testing & Tracking Results

Before sending the mailer out to your full audience it’s always a good idea to perform A/B testing in direct mail on a small test audience to ensure there aren’t any issues and that the audience is responding in the intended way.

Also make sure to have a way of tracking the campaign, whether that be via a unique URL, QR code or promotional code that recipients enter when buying their tickets, so that you can measure the success of your campaign. This will help you make adjustments and optimisations for future campaigns.

Benefits of Direct Mail in Event Marketing

There are many reasons why direct mail is beneficial to marketing events.

Highly Targeted

Easily target specific demographics so that your direct mailer is only seen by those who are relevant to your messaging or event.

Tangible

Direct mail creates a tangible product for your recipients that forms a memorable and engaging piece of marketing material that has been proven to receive higher engagement rates than the digital alternative. By focusing on choosing the right paper stock and finishes, you can tap into the fact that direct mail generates a 70% higher brand recall than digital channels.

Personalisation

Add a personal touch by adding the name of your participant to the mailer as well as other personal info that they can relate to and feel valued. This high-level of audience relevance has a direct impact on performance, with studies consistently showing that simply adding a name to direct mail can increase response rates by as much as 135%.

Measurable

Direct mail can be tracked and measured just like digital marketing.

Less-Competitive

The digital space is so overcrowded that direct mail provides a less competitive environment, meaning your mailer is more likely to break through the crowd, providing a unique opportunity to capture your audience’s attention. Crucially, the cost of attention for direct mail is significantly lower than for channels like social display, making it a highly efficient channel for securing consumer focus.

Direct Mail for Event Marketing with DMS

At DMS, we specialise in direct mail for event marketing. We are experienced in all aspects of direct mail campaigns, from printing and production to postage and data processing and are always excited to take on new creative ideas. We have state-of-the-art equipment and technology that can transform your direct mail designs into something that will surpass your expectations.

Always happy to help, our expert team are always on hand to answer any of your questions.