Create a Sensory Mail Experience

What is Sensory Direct Mail?

Sensory direct mail is a physical delivery that can enhance the recipient's experience by including relevant sensory elements. By incorporating sensory elements into the message, you can deliver something unique to your audience's homes, creating a truly memorable brand experience and bringing the message to life.

People, by nature, value what they touch. As humans, our skin is our largest organ, and touch can be one of the quickest and most vital ways to provide a wealth of information to our brain. With sensory direct mail, you can get as creative as possible with your direct mail item to make your business stand out from the numerous other advertising messages we see daily. By creating an interactive experience, your target audience is invited into the conversation through your direct mail message, which is likely to lead to a long-lasting brand impression. With direct mail, items are targeted and delivered to your selected audience. How your brand is first presented could play a key role in your message recall and campaign response.  

Sensory mail is an innovative, fun, and tactical way of creating a standout experience with your target audience, from the moment they receive your direct mail message through the letterbox. With direct mail, you can enhance your audience's experience in a number of different sensory ways, as there are very few restrictions on how creative you want to be. Your only restriction could be the available budget. To give you some examples of the sensory opportunities available with direct mail, we have outlined some for you:

Sensory Experience, with Direct Mail

• Sight: 

Direct mail as a channel can be very effective. In the modern world, over 93% of UK adults now own an internet-connected device (Source: National Statistics), so you have the opportunity to include digital links so your printed media can come to life. Design is considered the most critical and straightforward way of grabbing customers' attention by creating a visually unique piece with colours, images, text, and graphics.

• Touch: 

Using different textures, weights, and materials can hugely impact how consumers look at your brand and its quality. For example, silk paper could represent a professional, luxury company. You could incorporate a removable coupon the size of a business card that they can take with them, which gives the feeling that they already have money in their pocket.

• Smell:

If relevant to your message, scents can be ingrained within the paper to create a more emotive experience. ‘Scratch and Sniff’ is a paper infused with capsules that release a smell each time it is touched. Food scents, perfume, environmental, to name a few.

• Sound: 

Much like smell, sound can also bring out emotion. Sound clips can be used to grab and keep the attention of your audience. It is not commonly used in mail adverts so that it will be an enjoyable surprise. With this, you could record a message or your jingle to give it a personal effect.

• Taste:

This is another overlooked sense when it comes to marketing, mainly because it best suits those who can actually offer edible products. It is best utilised if you have a catering or food-based business. For product launches, small samples, such as wafer-thin strips, or more commonly known as 'peel and taste strips,' can be included within the mailing pack.

Combining the Senses, It Just Makes 'Sense'

Sensory experiences are crucial for creating that ‘real-world’ connection. With this in mind, look at the opportunities to include sensory connections with direct mail for senses like touch, sight, sound, taste, and smell. Behavioural science has shown that positive sensory experiences can influence behaviour subconsciously.

So, the more senses you can evoke, the more influential the subconscious behavioural impact. In 2020, 8.4% of all advertising mail drove traffic to companies' websites (Source: JICMAIL), which could have only been accomplished by successfully engaging at least one of the five senses.

Be mindful of your message and the target audience you are looking to connect with. You may not need to use all the senses at once, just the ones appropriate to your brand. For example, a coffee or chocolate brand is most likely to benefit from a sample for taste or an embedded scent within the paper.