What counts in parcel insert marketing

Parcel inserts are an ideal way for web retailers in particular to attract customers to their online stores. Advertising via enclosed flyers, product samples or brochures in parcels enables target groups to be addressed inexpensively, directly and with a wide reach. And most importantly: it is also well received. According to a study by GFK*, around 87% of recipients of parcel inserts pay attention to them and 67% state that they are very likely to use a customized parcel insert.

Ideal conditions for well-placed advertising, but without a strategy, the marketing of offers via parcel inserts is no guarantee of success. Paketwerbung.de, the parcel insert marketer from Trackscale, the agency for performance online and offline advertising space marketing, has examined the most successful drivers. The results show that three factors in particular determine the success or failure of parcel inserts:

1. before starting a parcel insert campaign, it is advisable to determine exactly which group of people the inserts should address. Only once the target group has been clearly defined can the appropriate senders be selected. They often provide their advertising partners with a target group profile so that criteria such as gender, age and purchasing power can be easily matched. If you want to save yourself the effort completely, you can use the services of insert marketers such as paketwerung.de, who take care of the entire process from target group analysis to the selection of senders and advertising media, right through to insert design.

2. the most important factor for effectively addressing the target group is the insert itself. It is not as important, as many might think, to have a particularly creative design or high-quality paper. It is much more important for insert recipients to receive a suitable offer from which they can benefit in terms of price.* It is therefore advisable for every advertiser to adapt the offer precisely to their target group, to clearly highlight discounts or promotions and to package information briefly and in a way that is easy to understand. If you want to be on the safe side, first test the success of two advertising media factors against each other in an A/B test, e.g. the type of advertising media, the product or the discount amount.

3 Once the insert campaign has been launched, it is important to keep at it and evaluate it constantly. Even during the campaign phase, it is possible to observe exactly which mailer delivers the most success or which advertising medium performs best. The data obtained provides important insights for subsequent campaigns and makes meaningful optimization possible. Here, too, the support of insert specialists can be helpful. paketwerbung.de, for example, has a special tracking tool that delivers campaign results in real time and enables campaigns to be quickly identified and optimized during their runtime.

*Study: European Couponing 2013, DiMaBay in cooperation with the Society for Consumer Research