Interactive Mailers for e-Commerce: How to Engage Customers with Unique Direct Mail Experiences
Interactive direct mail empowers your e-commerce business to take your messaging from the screen into the households of prospects and customers who trust printed mail but shop online. With attractive, quality, and interactive direct mail, your e-commerce business can engage audiences physically and establish authenticity that sets you apart from the competition.
Interactive e-commerce direct mail also gives businesses advantages and cost savings through the USPS Tactile & Sensory Promotion that encourages and rewards businesses to use interactive elements like pop-ups, fold-out panels, sensory elements, and special textures.
How E-Commerce Sites Are Using Interactive Mailers
Pop-Up Designs
E-commerce businesses that incorporate pop-up designs into their direct mail use the elements of surprise to transform an ordinary looking direct mail piece into a 3D representation of their brand and products. You can apply this element to bring a sense of realism to e-commerce products that online shoppers only experience in 2D and provides opportunities for storytelling that is engaging, interactive, and memorable into your promotions.
Fold-Out Panels
Direct mail pieces with fold-out panels provide e-commerce brands with abundant space to display products and guide prospects and customers to a compelling call-to-action using sequential panels that build excitement or arouse curiosity. Unique folds, such as gatefolds or z-folds, invite interactivity and can be opened to reveal coupons or product samples in fun ways. The larger fold-out space lets your brand use bigger photos and creative layouts that are not possible in a traditional mailer. Working with an experienced print provider enables your design team to create the most engaging and cost-effective print piece.
Textured Materials
E-commerce direct mail with textured surfaces immediately sets the piece apart from other mail the moment the recipient pulls it from the mailbox. Materials like linen, silk, or embossed paper or stock feel luxurious to the touch and special finishes such as soft-coatings, embossing, foil stamping add elegance. Raised UV coatings add extra dimensions to your e-commerce mailer that make a memorable and instant impression. Mailer material can accentuate the physical qualities of products with non-traditional components like wood veneer, fabric, or other unusual materials.
Gamification Elements
E-commerce direct mail pieces are especially engaging when they include gamification features that reveal discounts, promotional codes or lead to special gift offers. They encourage interactivity with irresistible scratch off reveals, quizzes and puzzles, interactive foldouts, and augmented reality (AR) integration that bridge the gap between the mailer and your website. Prospects and customers enjoy competing for rewards, gaining access to new products, and entering sweepstakes.
Augmented Reality (AR) Integration
When your e-commerce brand integrates AR technologies into direct mail pieces with QR codes, PURLs, or other digital links, you introduce audiences to interactive content through direct mail. Scans of direct mailer content can lead to product videos, tutorials, games and contests. With a thorough understanding of the buyer, you can use AR to deliver personalized content that is relevant to their lifestyles and offers a valuable and unique experience.
Personalized Messages and Graphics
E-commerce direct mail is an especially effective way to take the data your brand has collected online and deploy it offline with mailers tailored around the recipients’ purchasing habits and relationship with the brand. Variable data printing (VDP) and automated CRMs make it easy to insert images and text into the mail piece based on interests, location, or where the recipient is in the purchasing lifecycle. Segmenting audience by common and important characteristics increases the value of the piece and the likelihood of it resulting in a conversion.
Sensory Elements
By adding innovative and unexpected sensory elements to direct mail, your brand can trigger emotional responses that resonate deeply with prospects and customers. Beyond tactile elements, your direct mail can include scented inks and fragrances that stir memories or smells that comfort and convey trust. Innovative brands are using audio features in mailers by integrating sound chips to create voice-activated mailers. This allows them to include recorded messaging that plays through crush-proof speakers when activated by the recipient.
Spotlight: OSU Mailer
Oklahoma State University (OSU) began building community among new students with an interactive direct mail piece that encouraged them to put on school-logoed sunglasses and share selfies with fellow students.
A QR code on the mailer made it easy for students to connect with others and join in the fun.
Benefits of Interactive Direct Mailers for E-Commerce Companies
Regardless of your choice of interactive direct mail elements, you’ll realize tangible benefits when your prospects and customers can touch, explore, play with, and hold on to your printed direct mailer.
- Higher Engagement Rates: It’s practically impossible for a person not to sort through and take notice of their mail after retrieving it from the mailbox. Direct mail pieces enhanced with AR qualities stand apart. With interactive direct mail, your e-commerce business can connect with prospects and customers in ways that are not possible with traditional, non-integrated direct mail. Through that initial impression, your e-commerce brand can then build deeper connections with interactive elements that hold the recipient’s attention. According to Mailing Systems Technology, direct mail pieces enhanced with augmented reality (AR) can elevate engagement rates by up to 40% compared to traditional static mail, making recipients far more likely to interact with and remember the piece.
- Memorability: Your e-commerce brand can benefit from direct mail campaigns that recipients recall by including interactive elements and developing designs that serve a lasting purpose with their physical presence. Sensory engagement with quality stock and unexpected or elegant textures and trailing edge envelopes, rip-open envelopes, zip-strip envelopes, or reveal envelopes create multisensory encounters. Receiving interactive direct mail becomes a participatory event that makes the entire experience more immersive and unforgettable. The USPS Tactile, Sensory, and Interactive Promotion Guidelines document substantial lifts in recall and response rates as a result of adding multisensory elements—such as textures, scents, pop-ups, or sound chips—though individual campaign lifts may vary.
- Enhanced Conversion: Interactive e-commerce direct mail makes it easy for the prospect or customer to connect from the printed direct mailer to your e-commerce site where they can conduct a transaction or submit an order. The relationship starts with the direct mailer and then leads the recipient onto a personalized landing page through a scanned QR code or PURL with targeted promotions they’ll find valuable and timely. This seamless transition delivers more focused messaging and increases opportunities to boost sales. The USPS reports that direct mail that contains interactive elements like QR codes generates a response rate 30% or greater than traditional direct mail’s 2.7% to 4.4% average response rate.
- Brand Differentiation: By creating a tangible, memorable, and emotional bond with prospects and customers with interactive e-commerce direct mail, your e-commerce brand can stand out from the competition both in the mailbox and your industry. By establishing a physical presence, you distinguish your brand through a different but highly successful marketing channel and reinforce messaging across customer-preferred digital platforms. It lets prospects and customers see your brand in an entirely new light, amplifies reach, and creates experiences people remember. Multiple industry sources report that brands that incorporate interactivity into direct mail experience brand recall rates of up to 70% higher than traditional direct mail.
Conclusion
In the crowded digital world of e-commerce, it can be difficult to get noticed, but printed interactive direct mail will help your e-commerce business stand out from the pack. The tactile sensations experienced by the recipients draw their attention and the appeal of the interactive nature of the piece leads to greater engagement and conversion.
Contact Marketing.com to learn more about the many advantages that your e-commerce business can gain with interactive direct mail and how the USPS Tactile & Sensory Promotion can save your business money.