Joe Mak and Sheldon Popiel of Dissolve discussing what makes direct mail a unique and important asset to digital companies.
Transcription:
Dissolve sell stock footage and photography. Our goal is to enhance designers creative work with extraordinary footage and photographer we offer. Our collection is highly curated by our content team so that our customers are always looking at the best content available. As a digital company selling footage and photography online, we’ve used direct marketing to reach our customers in a different way. We also think that direct mail is a great way to reach customers that we wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to reach. It’s something that’s a lot more memorable than something that’s as disposable as an e-mail or a web banner that we might produce digitally. If we had the opportunity to connect the two, too. We’ll do a video online with, you know, potentially adding a emojis to a video – one we called a movie among us. And we have the ability to put that into print pieces well in the form of a flipbook. To me a direct mail campaign is successful if it’s memorable. We’ve seen a lot of customers share the stuff we’ve sent them, either on Instagram or even responding to us personally, and we’ve walked around offices and seen our stuff lying around. To me that’s that’s the thing – when you can produce something that has a reason to exist outside of just marking for our own company. So a little notebook that we send them, sketchbooks, flipbook something like that. The memorable factor is a really big part of it. Another thing that we kind of keep track of is, obviously, traffic to our website, the number are sign ups that are happening, the number of orders that are happening in a given month. We look at direct mail pieces as affecting not just the month that they’re mailed in, but as well as the following month. So we pretty much have a two-month window where we’re kind of using direct mail as a gauge for that particular frame of time. And I think internally, for us on the creative side, the gauge of success is also whether we think it’s great. We like to really look at ourselves as our customers – we’re creatives too – and if we’re not feeling something, if we wouldn’t want to keep that piece, if we think it’s a waste of paper than we think they would as well. So we take that to heart.