You know direct mail – you receive it, you use it, and it’s more effective than ever. But why? Why in our era of feature-rich, multimedia, permission-based marketing does direct mail still endure? Why do marketers know in their gut that direct mail is irreplaceable? When we sit down and spell it out, the not-so-obvious answers become obvious.

1. Direct mail is proven. Research shows that typical direct mail response rates are between 3 and 5 percent. Though this seems small, it is still a statistically reliable number for expected response rates and it could be very successful depending on the product or service being sold. For instance, a high-ticket item like a $10K window installation may only require one sale to pay for the entire mailing and then some. In this case, even a 0.5 percent response rate could be very profitable. The key is to determine your desired response rate at the onset so that you can calculate the proper investment and expected ROI.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing the challenges and benefits of localizing your marketing strategy across both traditional and digital marketing channels, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer that doesn’t see the value in the practice. But there’s one marketing channel where questions about localization remain and answers are hard to come by: social media.

When I was at the Integrated Marketing Week Conference in June, this was a continuing theme and topic of conversation, whether it came up in presentations, questions to speakers or simply conversations among attendees, so it’s clearly an issue of great consternation in the marketing community. That being said, let’s take a look at some possible strategies that can help businesses overcome the challenges of social media localization.