Printed DM Campaign Resources

B2B marketers in tears on Linkedin: “My ICP is impossible to engage, they hate marketing and don’t respond to anything.”
I hear you.

Anyone who markets to:

accountants
attorneys
IT security

marketers
old white dudes who don’t use the internet
you name it…

will feel like they have the hardest audience on earth.
For legit reasons.

I have “CEO” in my title, so I get my fair share of cold and warm outreach. Like you, I’m pretty hard to get a response from.

Here is how one company just got me to pay attention and spend minutes exploring a business offer we don’t even need:
Pens.com sent my business, Klear B2B, an actual piece of: Physical. Direct. Mail.

In 2024, in my sector, that is rare. The fact that they wanted to sell me pens which I don’t need is irrelevant now.

In my native language. Using image personalization, with our company’s logo.

Leading to a personalized landing page through a QR code.

What hooked me to open the envelope on my way to the trashcan, about to recycle it, is noticing: someone had clearly put quality marketing-effort into the thing I’m holding.

So the marketing geek inside me wanted to explore.

Lesson 1: If you can trigger the inner geek of your buyer persona, you’ve hooked them.

Lesson 2: If you use unsaturated channels, you’re much more likely to get engagement.

Direct mail is super old school. So much so, that it’s new-school and becoming cool again.

Which was also part of what got me curious.
If your audience is skeptical of everything on the internet, they’re hard to engage, then you might want to consider a creative direct mail campaign.

For a modern physical DM account-based campaign, a good idea is to
– start digital,
– send the physical mail that hooks them and- gets them to click to a personalized landing page
– …where you provide the chance for engagement on multiple channels.

Detailed Game Plan

High level overview:

send a heads-up email (+Li message) verifying the physical address of the recipient. Of course you’ll want to have a strong hook and create curiosity.
send physical mail
lead recipient to personalized landing page with company relevant information (perhaps with personalized video)
track to see if they opened the personalized landing page. After some time, if they haven’t or they didn’t take action, follow up in email/Linkedin.

Key steps in the process:

figure out strategy/personalization
use Clay to get specific target account information needed for personalization. Get Clay template here.
use information to generate personalized landing pages (perhaps with personalized video) using Sendspark.
export Clay table to csv appropriately formatted for Adobe InDesign
feed the URLs back into this csv and create unique QR codes for URLs using the IMAGE() function
generate the personalized printables in InDesign
Generate the csv needed to send emails/Li messages from your outreach tool(s)

An Example

The Growth /Transformation Journey Map. In B2B, you want to make people understand and feel the transformation you take them through, so mimicing that in a campaign will serve both parties well.

Concept

Design the mailer as a visually appealing map that illustrates the journey of a company from their current state to the desired “after” state. Each stage on the map represents different challenges and milestones in growth.

Story Continuation

Recipients can scan the QR code to access a personalized video where your expert guides them through their unique growth journey, highlighting specific strategies tailored to their industry and needs.

A prompt to create physical direct mail ABM campaign ideas

You are a master account based marketer with 29 years of experience. you are well versed in direct mail.

I want you to brainstorm ideas for the below company for a printed direct mail campaign, where we send each target account something in the mail. the goal of the campaign is to get the prospect to take action reading our mailing by scanning a qr code that leads them to a personalized landing page. we want to utilize qr codes that the recipient can scan with their phone that takes them to a personalized landing page, perhaps a personalized video.

Your job is to come up with ideas where we can start a plot/story in the direct mailing, and where the “story” continues on a personalized landing page.

Here is a description of the company I want you to brainstorm ideas for:

[insert Linkedin “about” URL or paste text here]

Closing Thoughts

This campaign has a lot of moving parts; it is not the easiest thing to pull off and definitely shouldn’t be your first ABM campaign. If you’d rather skip trial and error, talk to us about building this for you.

If you’re thinking, “we can pilot the messaging on a small scale with a digital-only campaign” – you’d be right! So feel free to (partly) test the concept digitally first.

Printing and mailing paper is considered expensive. When judging the efficacy of this campaign, we like to use the following metrics:

Cost per LP visit by target accounts
Cost per call booked per account

These costs vary on a wide scale. Sometimes they’re competitive or even beat what it costs to get a call through Linkedin ad campaigns.

Other times they won’t. But one thing is for sure: the coolness factor and memorability.

Regardless of whether our print DM campaigns succeed in getting calls booked the first time around, engagement is always high and the feedback from the market is overwhelmingly positive.

I’d say this is just as much a branding play. It can easily be the most memorable part of a buyer journey with 124-touchpoints lasting 18 months, so make it count!