Automate Print & Mail: What Is Postal Code Targeting?

Postal Code Targeting

Every business wants to put the best marketing strategies in operation for targeting prospects and customers and increasing conversions. Smart marketing methods are based on a lot of factors like a targeted database, creative ideas, personalisation, and more. It is essential to find and reach out to the right prospects who match your customer profile rather than indulging in general or blanket marketing.

Most marketers conduct direct mail marketing campaigns to target customers specifically. But what about acquiring new customers? Moreover, how do you get the details of your prospects to mail them? On what factors are you going to target them? Royal Mail helps you answer such questions with its unaddressed mail solutions. Using this method, you can target prospects without having their personal information like names and addresses.

What Is Postal Code Targeting?

As the name goes, postal code targeting simply means targeting prospects in certain postcodes. Basically, postal code targeting is a service offered by Canada Post to help businesses target and saturate specific postal codes. It is the biggest form of targeted marketing in Canada. In the UK too, Royal Mail offers similar services. With the help of door drops and partially addressed mail, it allows marketers to reach out to potential customers even without possessing their personal information.

Royal Mail has a database consisting of about 29 million postal addresses and more than a million postcodes. By availing of its services, you can not only target better but also have access to its huge database.

Door-to-Door Direct Mail

The door-to-door mail service provided by Royal Mail is all about sending out unaddressed door drops like postcards to specific households. Royal Mail helps you target households that match your customer profile. Marketers can choose to target local or national households as per their requirements and preferences without using their personal data. It means that you don’t address individuals; rather, you address households.

Door drops are an impactful addition to your marketing plans. They help you target both prospects and existing customers. Find below some statistics that convey the importance and effectiveness of door-to-door direct mail:

83% of door-to-door mail items are opened and read and even sometimes filed and stored by the recipients.
Door drops are super affordable. You can target up to 8,000 households in just around £500.
80% of the top advertisers in the UK use door drops for marketing.

It doesn’t matter if you are a small-scale or large-scale business, newly established or running for decades. You can avail door-to-door mail service anyway to reach out to the right households and communicate your message.

Some of the prime benefits of door drops are:

You can easily drive prospects and customers to your website and other digital platforms by sending them door drops. It is reported that 59% of recipients actively visit company websites after receiving such a mail item.
Door drops help companies increase sales. 67% of door drop recipients are prompted to purchase something. This way, you know that your direct mail campaign is actually working and producing amazing results.
People like to retain door drops. Most of the recipients stick them to their refrigerators or simply pin them on their boards. These things increase your brand visibility and further improve your brand image.
You can select from among 30 million houses all across the UK to target. With such a huge database and the means to target households relevantly, marketers can be assured of great results.

Partially Addressed Direct Mail

Partially addressed mail enables direct mail marketers to print and mail to generic recipients that share common traits or characteristics. Usually, such type of mail is personalised as far as the title is concerned. For example, “Dear Parent,” “Dear Cambridge Resident,” “Dear Car Owner,” and so on. Partially addressed mail helps you narrow down your target audience using certain geo-demographic factors.

It allows you to target on postcode levels, similar to postal code targeting in Canada and EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) in the US. Typically, there are 15 households under every postcode, and with partially addressed mail, you can saturate these postcodes.

Find below some statistics regarding partially addressed mail:

88% of such mail items are engaged with by the prospects. Naturally, partially addressed mail gets high open, read, and response rates.
Using partially addressed mail, you can reduce your postal charges up to 20%.
It is around 165 times more targeted as compared to door drops. So, though door drops also offer great results, you can always go for partially addressed mail for better targeting.
Your existing customers are excluded from your mailing lists so that you can focus on fresh acquisitions.

How does partially addressed direct mail work?

You will be targeting postcode levels. Hence you can use the postcodes where your existing customers reside. This way, you can target all the customer “rich” postcodes combined with geo-demographics to identify prospect’s “look-alikes.” This process is often referred to as “topping-up.”
It helps you achieve greater penetration in those postcodes or areas where you already know that your products or services have been or are being used.
Using this method, marketers can optimise customer targeting and cover maximum prospects.

Marketing at Scale

Want to conduct a large-scale direct mail campaign without customer data? Royal Mail can help you with that too. You can contact them with your volume requirements. Marketers can create a tailor-made marketing strategy for mailing in bulk.

Using PostGrid’s print and mail API, you need not go anywhere or do anything manually. It can bring all the Royal Mail services to you and assist you with everything. From detailed segmentation to personalisation, it can help you conduct highly targeted direct mail campaigns that have the ability to perform exceptionally well.

Connecting With New Prospects to Generate Fresh Leads

Before conducting any campaign, marketers are supposed to determine whether they want to target existing customers or new prospects. In case you choose to acquire new prospects, the best way to do that is through door-to-door and partially addressed mail, as we saw above. By employing certain demographics and geographics, it becomes easier to identify prospects. With such precise targeting, companies can connect with their audience easily and maximise ROI.

Conducting targeted marketing with Royal Mail is actually pretty straightforward and simple. Moreover, with PostGrid, you can simplify the whole process even further. The main mechanism is to filter and identify postcodes where most of the residents match your buyer persona. This way, you can get so many steps closer to your prospects. Further, you can design, print, and mail out attractive and convincing direct mail items to catch their attention and make them respond.

Targeting prospects through their residing postcodes means that you don’t have to send out the same mail items to everyone, and there is a scope for personalisation. You can offer exciting discounts and cashback. These offers can persuade them to buy from you, hence increasing your conversion rates.

You can always combine your own data with that of Royal Mail to get the best results. PostGrid also offers address verification solutions for you to verify and update your database and put it to use.

Conclusion

Postcode targeting is affordable, simple to conduct, and effective. It offers marketers a chance to conduct direct mail marketing campaigns even when they don’t have any mailing lists of their own. Not just that, Royal Mail provides these exceptional targeting and segmentation services at all-included rates with their unaddressed mail services.

Automate printing and mailing of postcards, letters, and cheques with PostGrid. Our direct mail API can help you conduct campaigns of any volume with exceptional efficiency and no manual effort.