The postcard below was mailed to our office this week. I’ve noticed more and more companies using “targeting tactics” via Direct Mail to get people to take their promotional offer. (Unfortunately their designs are way behind the times and this is a classic example of “this looks like an ad”.) But, I do want to point a few things out of how this thinking can help in your online marketing. The difference with this postcard is that they are doing targeting on top of just offering something for free ($350 in gift cards being offered for free to get you to take action on this postcard).
A tactic to get people to take action on their Birthdays.
It’s no great discovery to realize that they are using two tactics here. 1) They are offering the free $350 worth of gift cards in order to make you take action on purchasing an airline ticket. And, 2) They are targeting people on their birthdays making it much more likely that they will open this postcard that otherwise may seem like nonsense.
What I want you to take from this is the point of the birthday targeting.
When you are targeting online campaigns, such as a Facebook campaign, birthday targeting can make something all the more relevent.
Simply introducing an ad on someones birthday makes it seem unique and highly tailored to them, in other words, they are more likely to at least take a 2nd look at it since it is relevant.
The other cool thing in this postcard is that they listed a “offer number” code on the bottom corner. This makes it seem even more exclusive. Some of you may have experience promoting products as affiliates that have “coupon codes” this is a similar line of thinking, to make you think you are getting something exclusive that is not just available for everyone.
Next time you have tapped all the demographic data that you can think of and split tested everything under the sun, I challenge you to try one more thing. I challenge you to create a “birthday targeted” campaign, using your same offer or sell point from your previous ads, however this time offer it to them as a birthday special, like we see in this postcard.
I’ve never thought about Birthday targeting but that’s genius. Who doesn’t like to feel special on their birthday? Like you mentioned, more than likely, people will open such offers on their birthdays.
Definitely something to think about.
People sometimes feel like they have the right or can splurge and spend money on their birthdays, so this form of advertising may actually get a much better response rate than others!