How you can improve your marketing with multi sensory impact & direct mail

Marketing using physical promotional products (offline) is the only marketing technique that allows you to place your brand directly in your customers hands and reach potentially all 5 of their senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. With a better understanding of how the senses can engage customers, comes a whole new range of creative possibilities. 60% of consumers make a brand their first choice when it is successful in engaging with four to five senses (Contact magazine 2009).

The mindset of your target audience must be understood to ensure the creative appeals to them. Every touch, colour, sound and video message should be considered to target as many of the 5 senses as possible. These elements can help bring your consumer closer to your brand. They activate the senses which can help deliver greater results.

People place value on things they can touch and psychological experiments show that when people can see and touch something, 24% value it more. (Royal Mail 2015)

57% claim receiving mail makes them feel more valued and creates a genuine two-way relationship between brands & consumers. (Royal Mail 2015)

People get emotional around mail and 38% of respondents say that the physical properties influence how they feel about the sender. The production values can reinforce your brand values in a deep and intuitive way. (Royal Mail 2015)

People remember mail and 60% of respondents say that the best mail advertising helps keep a sender’s brand top of mind. It activates areas of the brain responsible for long-term memory and has a lasting effect that means recall will be more readily triggered later on. (Royal Mail 2015)

Scientific experiments have shown that people value something they can see and touch 24% more highly than something they can only see. (Royal Mail 2015)

Stimulating more than one senses speeds up the brain’s ability to process information. The behavioural marketing experts Decode reported in an experiment in 2008, participants were given a memory task with either visual cues only, or visual cues and sound. It took 60% less time to reach peak performance in this task when both senses were activated than when visual stimulus alone was used.

The same applies to touch. When two different groups of people undertook a memory task involving vision and touch, tactile signals were added that matched the visual patterns shown to the participants, learning performance improved considerably. (Journal of Vision 2007).

Direct Mail is the perfect promotional marketing product to engage and interact with your target audience and reach out to their senses.