You probably know the many ways to market your products and/or services: websites, social media platforms, email campaigns & animated videos are your digital marketing options. Postal mailers, and magazine, newspaper, radio & TV advertising are the old-school ways of reaching your audience.

Websites provide a platform to promote your business and keep visitors informed with regular blog posts. The benefit of digital marketing is it’s quick & free to communicate via social media. Email campaigns can reach large numbers with personalised messages but people are drowning in emails, and one more is likely to remain unopened, be deleted or simply ignored.

Traditional advertising is expensive compared to digital marketing, and you only need look at how the Yellow Pages has shrunk in recent years to appreciate the shift to online media. However, there is one area of traditional marketing which can prove very effective.

When was the last time you received a letter? Hardly any of us receive letters because the digital age lets us communicate instantly for a fraction of the effort and cost. But that means there is an opportunity for businesses to get noticed. Imagine trying to be heard in a stadium filled with people shouting and singing: that’s the internet. Now, imagine having a conversation in a quiet park: that’s postal marketing. If you receive a personally addressed letter, you would open and read it. Unlike that email…

If you’d like to try the traditional tactic of posting letters to complement your digital marketing strategy, you could consider outsourcing the printing & posting to a third party. This means paying a small mark-up on the postage (which is offset by not paying for paper, envelopes, printer and ink). We used to recommend cloudPostUK because it was good value and won us new clients but the service no longer seems to work, so I am reviewing alternatives.