Data is what drives successful marketing campaigns

Data opens doors. From connecting with existing and potential customers, to perfectly timing and locating your messages, to garnering insights and optimizing your campaigns – data is the key that unlocks marketing success.

Discover your ideal customer

Who is your ideal customer? Is it the busy suburban family loading up their minivan? The retired couple enjoying a leisurely summer at the cottage? Maybe it’s the downtown Gen Z starting her first real job? Maybe you don’t know.

Developing a picture of your ideal customer is the first step in creating an effective campaign. Marketing messages are easier to shape when you know the intended audience.

Fear not, the data you already have on hand – known as ‘first-party data’ – offers a lot of insights into the profile of your ideal customers. Ask yourself:

• What are the demographics of my best customers (age, income, education level)?
• Are my customers clustered in specific geographical areas?
• How might pain points influence their buying habits (for example, time-starved working families)?
• Are there any life stage and/or lifestyle traits that my customers have in common (for example, empty nesters)?
• Where do they spend their time online?

Augment those answers with additional information from Canada Post and other partner resources to further define your ideal customer. Then, use that profile to target lookalike audiences to find new customers, as well as build increased loyalty among existing customers by showing that you understand their needs.

When Green Acres needed help understanding its ideal customer, the landscaping company turned to a Canada Post expert partner. To spread news of the company’s snow blowing services, the partner helped Green Acres use data to find its ideal customers. This saved time and money, deploying a targeted campaign to interested homeowners. The campaign generated 500 responses, increased client numbers by 50 per cent and delivered a six-fold return on investment.

Make your message heard with the right targeting strategy

Knowing who your ideal customer is tends to be the first step in finding the right way to target them. Data intelligence makes this possible by allowing you to reach specific audiences via a host of different targeting segments (e.g., demographics, address attributes, interests, behaviours, lifestyles, life stage).

To help marketers get smarter with targeting, Canada Post offers three different ways to use data for direct mail. Each method affords various opportunities to optimize your targeting strategy and media mix:

Canada Post Neighbourhood Mail™

Neighbourhood Mail™ connects you to every home and apartment in specific neighbourhoods or regions across Canada. It’s a powerful, proven marketing tool with a wide reach – allowing you to cover large areas.

Postal Code Targeting

This surgical targeting tool targets prospects and customers at the postal code level to reach a desired audience. Postal Code Targeting layers geographic, demographic and lifestyle insights onto postal code data to optimize your reach. The location of a potential customer plays a key role in determining who is most likely to engage with your brand. Chances are, people who live in the same neighbourhood share similar demographics, life stage, aspirations, preferences and behaviours.

Canada Post Personalized Mail^TM

Win loyal customers by being relevant to the individuals you’re targeting – whenever and however they choose to interact with you. Personalized Mail works well for both building customer loyalty and customer acquisition.

Hand & Stone Massage and Facial Spa  is a great example for how this works. With the goal of increased sales of facials, the company tested a direct mail campaign on a store with stagnant growth. Using segmentation data based on lifestyle and interest to target prospect clusters and predictive eye tracking (PET) to test mail piece design, they increased facials from 27 per cent to 34 per cent of total sales.

Measure and optimize your campaigns with data-driven solutions

All campaigns are equal in the absence of proper measurement. That’s why in today’s omni-channel ecosystem, understanding and attributing results to the proper channel in the media mix can mean greater success for future campaigns.

Data provides valuable insights that enable brands to measure direct mail results and optimize future campaigns, including insights into response rate, lift analysis, ecommerce profile of respondents, settlement type, demographic characteristics and PRIZM segments. It can also be used to shape creative, enhance storytelling or guide content towards something that resonates more deeply with your ideal customers.

Montreal-based Altitude Sports found success doing just that. In the leadup to the critical Black Friday-Cyber Monday period, the online outdoors company sent mini catalogues to 160,000 select customers – a segmented and targeted list that included clients who did not make a purchase in the 120 days beforehand. That campaign resulted in a 4.2 per cent reactivation rate within 30 days after the customer received the mini catalogue. Those findings led to the brand continuing its mini catalogue program, as well as adding in other high-value print materials like a magazine.

Data intelligence has kicked down the doors of opportunity for countless brands. Those willing to direct their efforts toward understanding who their customers are and then crafting direct mail campaigns that resonate meaningfully for them will find success