17 days to engage your audience

It's a fact - a piece of mail stays in your household for at least 17 days before being disposed and disregarded. That's potentially 17 days where your customers may see your communication on the coffee table, lying next to the phone or stuck to the fridge. So if communications are being kept within touching distance for so long, why is it that organisations still struggle to engage with their customers?

With 95% of transactional documents being read by consumers and 56% preferring print over more digital forms of communication, you would expect response rates to be high. However, many organisations still struggle to engage their customers with the documents they're mailing.

Too much noise

It's been researched that the average human being receives up to 3000 marketing messages every day. Whether that's through email, in-app adverts or even Facebook advertising and LinkedIn messaging; people are having a daily battle to filter out what's relevant to them or what they can forget. If you're sending transactional documents, you're already one step ahead as your communications are not only important, but they are expected. They are often pieces of information that hold sensitive or financial information about the customer which requires some sort of action. But even if your letter is so important; with your customer taking in so much information on a day-to-day basis, they need help from you to deliver them a document that makes it absolutely clear to them that they need to read it. Too often, organisations are sending documents that are extremely generic, A4 pieces of paper with black and white Times New Roman font. It's certainly not the recipe for a happy customer to engage.

Utilise the power of data (that you already hold)

By using the data in your legacy systems, you are more than able to create compelling, engaging and beautiful documents that your customers will fall in love with. Okay, maybe a step too far, but by using your data in different ways, it's been shown to increase response rates dramatically, therefore resulting in happier customers and an increase in ROI.

By using data to personalise documents for example, has been proven to be key in engaging customers and can go much further than using just the customer's name in the opening sentence. Messaging can be tailored to demographics or location or even be personalised depending on where the customer is in the buying cycle. Vibrant, colourful personalised graphics can also be based entirely on individual customer data - with it being well documented that colour has a huge effect on engagement and the brain.

It's all about the experience

By 2018, customer experience will overtake price as the key brand differentiator which is why organisations are taking steps to dramatically improve how they engage with their customers. As a result, it's essential that you give your customers compelling and relevant documents that make them want to engage. The power of print may have given you 17 days to reach your customers, but unless you utilise the power of your data, your communications will be lost in the noise.