Geomarketing: Target Your Direct Mail With Our New Filter

To gain a better understanding of what’s happening in direct mail marketing, you often need to look at where a mail piece was mailed to.

Fortunately, we have just added a brand-new filter to the Who’s Mailing What! search function that allows you to segment the direct mail we’ve tracked by its geography.

You’ve already seen how our process of gathering mail intelligence works. It all starts with the mail received by our panel of over 100 people, carefully distributed among urban, suburban, and rural areas across the United States.

Because of this balance, you get a very good representation of what products and services are being marketed by direct mail in a variety of locales.

The Value of Geographic Search

This new feature gives customers like you — for the first time ever — a way to answer some important questions about your brand’s competition, such as:

• What states and localities are being targeted by your competitors? Answer: You can find out with a search by state. If you’re looking to expand your marketing outside of your current focus, it helps to research the competitive landscape in any industry category or subcategory. Seeing what they’re mailing lets you adjust your strategy and tactics for each potential new market before you spend a dime.
• What offers are being sent to these consumers? Answer: Thanks to this new segmentation, you can compare mailings that have been sent out to a consumer in one state with an offer from a mailing sent to another state. The price points and product or service features may differ depending on an area’s demographics, climate, and other factors.
• What creative — copy and design — is used in the mailings? Answer: Like offers, the creative elements used by a company may be significantly different depending on the areas targeted, as noted above.

Above, here are two mail pieces mailed by the Progressive for its auto insurance. The offer is identical in both cases. However, the first one was received in Florida, Michigan, and New Jersey while the second was mailed to prospects in California and Maryland.

With our geo filter, you can see how creative differs depending on the location targeted by a marketer, which gives you insight into both the company and the audience it’s trying to reach.

Also, that’s a great tool for printers and service providers, as the geographic select gives you an opportunity to target new business, especially mailers and brands with customers and prospects near your facilities. Searching with the geographic and industry category (or subcategory) filters can help you identify qualified leads with specialized direct mail printing needs. Click on the company profile to get a snapshot of its most recent direct mail activity.

It all starts with the mail. The information in Who’s Mailing What! is based on mail that has actually passed through the postal system to real customers throughout the United States. You save time and money and achieve peace of mind knowing that by us doing the legwork, you can concentrate on what you do best: improving your direct mail intelligence and marketing success.

How to Search by Geography in Who’s Mailing What!

The geographic filter is easy to find and use.

After logging in to the website, just click on the Search button at the top of the dashboard.

On the search page, you’ll see that you have a variety of filters. Under “Direct Mail Filters”, you’ll find the “Panelist Location” one. Start typing the state’s name to quickly select the one you need.

This filter allows you to segment mail pieces by the state that they were mailed to, based on where our panelists live. Feel free to pick as many states as you need at a time.

But even without applying those filters, you’ll see all the states the mail piece was received in on the search results page.

For each mail piece that comes up in the results, you can find out how many times it was mailed as well as get an overview of its distribution. To get more details for the exact campaign, go to the PDF viewer page. There you can find a bar chart with a breakdown of when and how many times the selected mail piece was received. At the same time, the map chart displays its distribution across the states.

That’s all there is to it.

Final Thoughts

The new geographic search adds an important, updated capability for your work. Now you can see exactly who’s mailing what, and not just when — but where.

It’s a feature that’s been on the wish list of customers over the years who’ve wanted this level of detail to help them develop a better picture of what their (or their client’s) competition is doing with direct mail. Now it’s here.

But we’re not done yet. In the coming months, we will be improving this new feature by adding zip code to the search function.

As always, our senior data scientists and product managers are developing additional products to improve the value we deliver to you with your membership.