THE ROLE OF DIRECT MAIL IN 2019: USING THE BUYER LIFECYCLE AND MARKETING AUTOMATION (PART 2)* Marketing automation is vital today to help retailers and marketers respond to market changes and customer changes.* Customer databases are predominately one-time buyers* The benefits of direct mail are clear: much less clutter than the average e-mail inbox has or the average Facebook browsing session has, and a lot more durability.* Traditional mail, whether it’s postcards or letters or catalogs, having a tangible reminder in your hand to drive you to the Web for fulfillment seems to be very effective for marketers.* Direct mail needs to be synchronized with the communications online that customers are receiving.What follows is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 16 of the Inevitable Success Podcast with special guest host Mike Ferranti and his guest Gary Beck.(Listen Here)TranscriptMike: Welcome back for part two of our podcast and our interview with Gary Beck on direct mail in 2018. If you’ve not listened to part 1, do yourself a favor and give it a listen. You can find it in the Inevitable Success content hub on BuyerGenomics.com and on iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify.In Part 2 Gary provides a great example and wraps up the discussion on affinity or lifecycle marketing, and the two biggest requirements to deploy a successful direct mail campaign. The first of course is creating the intelligence and knowing the discrete stages in each individual buyers’ lifecycle. And second is aligning those buyer lifecycle stages and the changes from one stage to the next with marketing automation, so that you can act on them in real time. Both are critical components to your success in buyer lifecycle management. Now with that context, let’s go back to this thought-provoking discussion that can help you make a better performing direct mail campaign and be a better direct marketer.There’s a phenomenon that is referred to as “cocooning” that comes probably not far after children where the focus goes from that early life-stage where the focus is on going out into the world, traveling, working, spending time with friends to tending to the nest. There’s this nesting phenomenon where you’ve purchased the first home in expectation of children, or shortly after children, and spending more time at home and really feathering the nest because that’s really the focal point of their life now.And for a marketer, that as well as other stages that they go into are marketing bonanzas, really, because they have more needs and a greater appetite to fill them. But probably most importantly is that at each of those stages, they’re different. And if you have the intelligence to know what those differences are, well then you could use that perhaps to market to the right person, but do so at the right time as well.Gary: And that is true. One of the things that we have known for quite a long time is that new movers, people who have changed residents, are likely to spend significantly more in the upcoming year than they have in previous years just because of that nesting phenomenon- that when they change their residence, they have lots of new needs whether it’s needs for new furniture or different furniture. Usually, there’s some catalyst that has caused the move such as perhaps the need for more room due to the potential arrival of a new child in the family. So there are many pieces of data that can help us piece together that change in life-stage. And as a result of that change in life-stage, it should, for those companies that have a relationship with the customer, it should provide important clues as to what’s the next most likely set of products that this customer is likely to purchase or likely to need.