7 Ways to Personalize Direct Marketing Using Front Door Media

Email can do it. Direct mail can do it. Social media can sort of do it. But how can front door media be used to personalize your direct marketing campaigns? 

You probably know something already about how powerful personalization can be. One study found that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy when they receive a personalized experience from the business.

That’s pretty good.

But personalization doesn’t do much if no one sees the message. That’s where door hanger marketing shines above all other media forms. With a high-quality advertisement placed on the consumer’s front door, your impression rate will be nearly 100%, because almost no one can resist looking at something on their own front door.

This is even more true with Power Direct’s brand of door hangers, which are far more than the flimsy fliers flapping in the wind that most people imagine when picturing door hangers.

In a moment, we’ll share seven ways to personalize direct marketing using door hanger distribution and marketing. But first, let’s get clear on our terms.

What is personalization in marketing?

Personalization can take many forms. The simplest version is the classic mail merge concept, where a direct mail campaign or email is written, and each recipient’s personal information is inserted at specific points in the letter. The greeting is the most obvious place to do this. But you can also insert addresses, contact information, company names, previous purchases, and much more, depending on the quality of your customer data. 

Today, marketers are coming to view personalization as much more than just inserting information into sales messages.

A better understanding of personalization is relevance, as this Forbes article expands on. Relevance means the marketing content speaks to the context in which the recipient lives, acts, thinks, and believes. 

So, while relevant content might not include the recipient’s name, it may speak much more personally to their lifestyle preferences, hopes and dreams, cultural background, employment background, educational background, and various other aspects of their life.

Why door hangers are the superior version of direct mail

You can create personalized marketing in nearly any marketing channel, and the tools available will be different each time. For today, we’re talking about direct mail personalization — but especially door hangers. Why?

Because door hangers are sort of like the overachieving cousin of direct mail marketing. 

Both get delivered to customers and prospects who are on a mailing list either owned or purchased by the business behind the campaign. Both are printed. Both can measure response rates and conversion rates using similar data collection strategies. Both can employ data driven marketing efforts.

But door hangers have numerous benefits over direct mail campaigns.

More impressions

Door hangers get seen by nearly every prospect they’re sent to, at higher rates than any other form of printed or digital advertisement, except possibly for SMS. Why?

Because it’s easy to simply collect all the mail in your mailbox every day, toss the marketing materials unopened, and then open all the bills. In contrast, door hangers arrive on the front door, alone and without any competition from other advertisements or from negative associations like paying bills. They will be viewed nearly every time.

Faster customer engagement

In the direct mail marketing world, a door hanger is more like a postcard than a letter, because the marketing message is visible without having to open an envelope. Even if customers take it straight to the recycling bin, they will still likely look at it before it gets there. Those few seconds can mean the difference between getting their attention or missing the sale.

Better visuals

Door hangers are bigger than most forms of direct mail marketing — including large postcards. Power Direct offers several different sizes of door hangers, but all of them offer ample room on both sides to create striking visuals, a call to action they can’t miss, compelling headlines, and all the other elements of effective marketing promotions such as testimonials, benefits, and bullet points. 

In other words, you have room to do what it takes to make the sale. 

Personalized approach

It’s true that you can employ a personalized marketing strategy with your direct mail efforts. But everything you can do with personalized direct mail, you can also do with door hangers, and more. Why? Because with door hangers, you can target specific addresses to create personalized campaigns that deliver a more memorable customer experience.

When individual customers see personalized content that calls them out in ways that make them feel special, they’re more likely to respond positively. And because your marketing message gets seen immediately with this form of media, more customers will see it.

So while direct mail marketing is effective and can also be used to create personalized marketing, door hangers usually outperform it. Almost everything direct mail does, door hangers deliver at the same level or better.

7 ways to personalize marketing using door hangers and front door media

Personalized marketing is one type of marketing with more options available online than offline. For instance, it would be prohibitively expensive to create personalized direct mail that utilizes the purchase history of each customer. That would mean printing different content for every single recipient. You can do that type of thing with certain online marketing media channels such as email marketing.

But when you combine personalization with the other advantages of direct mail marketing — including door hangers — you can create a powerful customer experience that results in higher response rates and conversions rates. 

Here are some direct mail personalization strategies that will elevate door hanger marketing to an even higher level of performance.

1. Use the copy

While it’s possible to personalize addresses and other information on door hangers, it’s not as easy as with direct mail. This is because the door hanger distribution process is already more personalized in that you don’t just plaster whole cities and zip codes with fliers. Personalizing addresses isn’t necessary. 

Door hanger marketing, the Power Direct way, is much more targeted and intelligent. 

While companies can personalize contact information for their target audience, there are several better ways to create tailored content for door hangers. Here are a few:

Mention localities

If you are promoting something at a location near customers’ homes, you could mention a familiar landmark, the local high school, a pro sports team, or some other reference that only certain people would relate to. 

Feature local sales reps

Mention your local sales rep or store manager and give their actual contact information. Even better — include a photo. That’s personalization because the recipient realizes this isn’t some national mass marketing campaign. They can call someone who works right down the street. 

In today’s world with customer service workers halfway around the globe, knowing the face and name of the actual person they can do business with gives you a competitive advantage because it increases customer satisfaction.

Highlight culture and language

You can also use copy to create personalized experiences for customers with different cultures and languages. This could mean writing one side of the door hanger in English, and writing the other in a different language. It could mean making cultural references that most people in your target audience will recognize.

2. Personalize with images

Door hangers are all about getting your customers’ attention in a unique and unusual way. The door hanger itself achieves this because it greets the prospect in a place where they rarely see any advertising — their front door.

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But it achieves it even more through creative and effective use of images.

If you’ve conducted good data analysis about the demographics of your prospects, you can select images that will connect with them on a personal level. This could be cultural. It could be based on lifestyle, values, or experiences.

If your prospects all have kids, include images with children. If you’re distributing door hangers to retirees, include photos of retired people living in a way that aligns with your marketing message. For singles just starting their careers, use a different type of imagery.

Relevant images will engage the recipients by visually communicating, “this is for me.” This is a data-driven approach that ensures the right message is reaching the right people. 

3. Use QR codes

QR codes enable you to tap into the personalization capabilities of the internet, with the door hanger functioning as the gateway. 

With a QR code, anyone who scans it can be taken to a website that’s personalized to customers from their demographic, cultural, or lifestyle context. On that page, you can employ all sorts of direct marketing and lead generation strategies to get them to respond to your call to action. You’ll also be able to track their browsing history, which can be a valuable tool for ongoing digital marketing efforts.

4. Personalize by location

Suppose your company has five locations in a city, and you want to run a promotion using door hanger marketing. You can create personalized experiences simply by displaying the closest location to each recipient, depending on where they live. This will produce far better results than typical location-based out of home advertising like billboards.

The most effective door hangers that personalize by location will include an actual map as part of the door hanger, so the recipient can see streets they recognize and know exactly where to go.

If you’re running a grand opening, grand re-opening, or some other special event, this marketing strategy is even more effective. Combine the map and the messaging with the name of the store manager, a landmark, and a local news or sports reference, and now you’re using multiple forms of personalized content. 

5. Employ your customer data 

Power Direct ran a campaign for a warehouse grocer that was doing a grand opening. But the company realized that some of the households in the neighborhoods nearest to the new store were already members shopping at stores that would now be farther away.

So, Power Direct created two versions of a door hanger for the company, one to current members telling them about a new, much closer store, and another to non-members. 

The door hangers for current members focused on deals and perks and how they could take advantage of them much closer to home. The main goal here was customer retention — now you have one more reason to keep your membership.

The door hangers for non-members focused on acquisition, and offered motivations and perks for signing up. So, two very different calls to action in the same door hanger marketing campaign, personalized by customer data.

There are many other ways to employ data-driven personalized marketing. 

You can identify customers in a given area who have a basic subscription plan, or a lower internet speed, and send door hangers motivating them to upgrade. 

You can find customers who have kids or no kids, who fit within certain income ranges, who qualify for government credits related to your industry, and others who fit a great variety of demographic and psychographic categories.

Then, create personalized offers for your chosen target audience, and send door hangers to these existing customers. 

This is a great example of relevance as personalization. Door hangers sent to women with kids in college can talk about the joys of empty nest living and all the freedom they can now experience and the opportunities they can pursue. The messaging seems personalized and relevant, even if there’s no actual personal data in the advertisement. 

It is more relevant content than typical mass marketing, and will generate higher response rates — especially when using door hangers.

6. Predictive modeling

This is the customer acquisition version of personalization using your customer data.

Here, you take a look at your data and look for which types of people shop at your store or buy particular products. Then, you take that data and look for copycat audiences who aren’t shopping at that store or buying that product, but who seem very likely to if they knew about it.

Then, you create a door hanger marketing campaign and send it out to that new audience.

This will be just as relevant as the previous strategy, but now you’re engaging new audiences rather than existing customers based on data from previous purchases.Predictive modeling capability is just another reason why Power Direct is so different from what many businesses and companies think of when they imagine door hangers.

7. Interactive features

Door hangers can enhance the customer experience in ways no online marketing channels can replicate. One of those involves tactile features that engage the senses. 

You can incorporate smell into your marketing strategy using scratch and sniffs and free samples. You can engage other senses using scratch-off features — much like a lottery ticket — that reveal a prize that can only be claimed by visiting your store. 

The more interactions you initiate between consumers and your marketing collateral, the more you will boost response rates. 

And while interactive features don’t necessarily connect on a personal level as we’ve defined personalization, the very act of engaging with your marketing makes it personal, in that moment. You can more easily get them to care about something they may not have cared about before.

Plan your next door hanger campaign

Personalized and relevant marketing begins with knowing your audience. We hear that all the time, but how do you do it?

The first step is to identify an audience of potential customers based on effective data usage.

When you receive a customized project recommendation from Power Direct, we also give you a free Ad Targeting Report and analysis that shows the exact locations of your best customers. 

Even if you don’t work with us this time, you get to keep that report and use it however you want!

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