It is an uncontested fact that marketing plays an important role in shaping the viability and sustenance of the business. Like many aspects of the business, marketing practices have also experienced a drastic shift post-industrialization. Now, one is available with many marketing tools and concepts.
However, in the plethora of mainstream and traditional marketing strategies, it is becoming important for a business to adopt unique and unconventional measures to stand out among the competitors.
Unconventional Marketing: What and Why
Taking a different route with promotions can be a game changer for your business and in a good way. There are some essential features and yields of any unconventional marketing drive.
Creativity: The Soul of Unconventional Marketing Practices
Before we move to discuss unconventional marketing in detail, it is really important to understand that creativity is at the core of any such campaign. Whether you are doing it digitally, directly, or in outdoors, any sound unconventional marketing outing can only conclude successfully if it is centered on a creative hook.
Look around and you will find that every unconventional promotional campaign highlights a brilliant underlying creative idea. So, at the onset of taking an unconventional route with your direct mail marketing, make sure that you have a good creative idea to start with.
Cost-Effectiveness: An Added Benefit
In general, the cost of any marketing campaign greatly depends on the approach taken by the business. A simple marketing practice can become a costly affair if it is not managed carefully and the same goes for unconventional means of promotion.
However, in most of the cases, such marketing campaigns are cost-effective, particularly if the platform on which it stands has a brilliant idea in its foundation. One can say that in unconventional marketing strategies ingenuity can compensate for the expenses.
Leaving a Strong Imprint on the Memory: The Desired Consequence
This is the most noteworthy outcome of unconventional marketing strategies. People are used to run-of-the-mill promotions. Therefore many times, they get easily lost in the junk of consumers’ memory. On the other hand, a good unconventional marketing campaign stays with recipients for a long time. There are some decades-old unconventional marketing gimmicks still fresh in peoples’ memory. Why? Just because they were original and different from the rest.
Developing a Clout: Another Desired Consequence
Even if an unconventional marketing campaign fails to deliver the required results, it still helps in developing your clout in the respective industry. Consumers will be more receptive to what you say in the future as compared to your competitors.
All in all, there are no apparent downsides to going unconventional with your promotions. It’s just about how much you can reap from it.
Direct Mail and the Route of Unconventional Marketing Practices
Direct mail marketing is one such promotional device that has never gone out of fashion. For decades, it has been used by business regardless of their size and scope. The wave of digitization that has swept over the world with the start of this millennium can’t get any success in cutting down the influence and effectiveness of direct mail marketing.
How direct mail marketing has been powered by different targeted mailing lists in recent years is a significant factor in keeping this mode of promotion relevant. Moreover, the conformity demonstrated by direct mail to adjust to any other mode of marketing has also helped it in keeping it a viable option of promotion for businesses.
These recent innovations in direct mail marketing have also enabled marketers to go unconventional with it. With the help of a wide range of targeted mailing lists at their disposal, there is a lot of room for different business to take an unconventional route with their marketing campaigns.
Let’s discuss some of the unconventional paths that one can take in direct mail marketing with the help of targeted mailing lists.
Going Unconventional With Automotive Mailing Lists
The automotive mailing list is the records of recipients or rather vehicle owners according to the type of the car, its manufacturer, its year of the make, and model. You can also ask your mailing list broker for more distilled automotive mailing lists on the basis of the income of the vehicle owner, his age group, and ethnicity.
Aside from giving you different bits of key information for devising an effective marketing campaign, automotive mailing lists can also help you with an unconventional marketing campaign. Let’s see how.
Start a Monthly Auto Review Series
Whether you want to promote your auto finance business or aftermarket services, you can go unconventional by starting an auto review series. You can reach out to your prospective consumers every month with a direct mail that comprehensively talks about the vehicle(s) you are dealing and the ones owned by the recipients (you can find about that in automotive mailing lists).
Don’t promote any of your product or service in these episodic direct mailings. Try to keep them as informative as you can. This unusual way of promoting your business will pay off gradually by establishing a strong connection with your prospective consumers. A vehicle owner when in need of some relevant product or service will definitely prefer the venture that is providing him with valuable information every month over its competitors.
Send out Small Add-ons to Prospective Consumers
With automotive mailing lists, you can exactly find out about the type of vehicle your prospective consumer is driving, you can use this information to devise a highly targeted and unconventional marketing campaign. For instance, if you deal in Ford accessories and aftermarket parts and want to target only that cohort of vehicle owners, then post small add-ons to your consumers that can go well with their cars e.g. A small dashboard mat, a merchandised key chain etc. This type of marketing campaign might cost you some extra bucks, but in a long run, it will provide you with a good return on investments.
Going Unconventional With Mortgage Mailing Lists
Mortgage mailing lists are available in a wide range of selects used by reverse mortgage business, home loan providers, and other related businesses. There are multiple unconventional routes of direct marketing that you can take through mortgage mailing lists.
A Monthly Newsletter on Real Estate Marketing Trends
People in need of home financing services are always curious to know the recent real estate trends of the locality in which they are living or want to move. You can help them by issuing a newsletter shedding light on the latest outlook of the real estate market. While devising such a direct mail, make the most part of it about the overview of the market. In the end, you can surely talk about the services you are offering.
Start a Direct Mail Blog
The Internet has made things really convenient for homeowners too. From renovation tips to cost-effective remodeling measures, they can find any pertinent information on the web. However, the majority of homeowners still don’t particularly go on the internet to get this information.
This disengagement from the internet provides businesses an opportunity to make things convenient for homeowners and beneficial for themselves. You can actually send them out this information through direct mailings. From mortgage mailing lists, you can find an extensive amount of information about the home construction of the recipients.
For example, you can select a group of recipients from mortgage mailing lists with pools built on their residential property. You can reach out to them before the start of the winter with a blog on how to winterize your pool. Receiving this valuable information in your mailbox just at the right time will surely take them by a pleasant surprise. It will also ignite a spark of curiosity in the recipients regarding your business, which might help you with better lead generation.
From the type of exterior to the type of heating and cooling system used in the house, you can find a lot of details in different mortgage mailing lists selects. You can use this detail to work out pertinent direct mail blogs. This subtle way of marketing your business will surely pay off.
Going Unconventional With Credit Score Mailing Lists
Credit score mailing lists can also be used to take an unconventional route of marketing. This targeted mailing list can provide you with different financial details of the recipients through different selects. Businesses rendering financial services can use this information to devise an unusual and striking direct mail campaign. Let’s take a look.
Flooding Them With Ideas
Instead of bragging about your business, become their partner through direct mail. With the help of credit score mailing list selects providing you with the information on a number of open lines of credit of the recipients, you can pull this gambit off.
Having an open line of credits shows that the recipient is a proprietor himself. A large number of open lines of credit shows that the recipient is doing pretty well in whatever he is doing as a business and might in need of new ideas and innovation. So, you can help all such recipients by sharing innovative ideas for new startups and business extensions.
It’s really simple to understand that people preoccupied with their work won’t bother to read about the dry details of your business. However, by using the bait of topics that interest them, you might succeed in conveying your marketing message to them.
Empathize in Your Direct Mail
If you operate in the domain of loan servicing and other related services, then it’s important to empathize with the situation of your prospective consumer first. While reaching out to people with low credit scores or the ones who have filed bankruptcy, it is really important to gain their trust first by assuring them that you understand their situation.
Devise your mailings to look more like a helping advice instead of a promotional piece. For instance, you can majorly talk about tips to improve credit scoring, or how to manage things on a tight budget. By reaching out to your prospective consumers like that, you can actually build a truthful relationship with the recipients.
Going Unconventional With Ethnic Targeted Mailing Lists
These targeted mailing lists provide you with racial and religious backgrounds of your recipients. These socio-cultural characters consciously and sub-consciously derive consumer behavior. You can also use them in an unconventional direct mail marketing campaign.
A Direct Mail Rich in Culture
Let’s suppose you are targeting Arabic demographics from one of the ethnic targeted mailing list selects. A one way to make your promotion unconventional is to talk more about their culture and less about your products and services.
However, keep in mind your direct mail shouldn’t sound patronizing or goes in the trajectory of cultural appropriation. So, don’t act as if you are in love with the Middle Eastern culture in your direct mail. You have to convey to your prospective consumers that it’s about them and not you.
For instance, adding an anecdote from One Thousand and One Nights in your direct mail would create a better impression of your business on the Diaspora living away from the home. Similarly, any historical and popular cultural device of any ethnicity can be used to make your direct mailings unconventional and best suited for ethnically-driven marketing.
Aside from taking help from targeted mailing lists to create unconventional promotional campaigns, you can also adopt these measures to inculcate uniqueness in your direct mails.
Use Large Envelopes and Cards
Instead of using regular envelope and paper for your direct mail, you can go with hard paper and cards for your direct mail. A distinctive envelope among the rest of the mail will definitely catch the eye of recipients.
Dispensing the Mail Yourself
For highly targeted campaigns, you can adopt this measure. Going door to door with your direct mail, while enacting a role of the postman, will surely convey a unique impression of your business.
By mix and matching the ideas that are mentioned in the above discussion, one can definitely pull off an unconventional direct mail marketing campaign.
