The 5 Differences Between Alyce and Traditional Direct Mail

By Mary Matton on September 3, 2023

From time to time the question comes up, “What’s the difference between Alyce and traditional direct mail solutions?” 

While a few providers on the market help you send dimensional mailers to your prospects and customers, the right platform will make all the difference in both acquiring and retaining revenue. This page will help you understand the difference between Alyce and traditional direct mail solutions to help you select the right platform for scaling your business.

Direct Mail is about the “Send”

If you’re looking for help keeping a swag closet full or to off-load your shipping and fulfillment, then traditional direct mail solutions are a good choice. Commonly referred to as “sending platforms,” traditional direct mail is all about making inventory management and the “send” of dimensional mailers easier for you. 

While the focal point of the “send” makes managing your direct mail solution easier on you, there are drawbacks to traditional solutions. Most direct mail solutions leave the most important consideration out of the picture – the gift recipient experience.  

The Importance of the Gift Recipient Experience

Email. Display ads. Billboards. Direct mail. 

These marketing tactics were all stellar ideas in their day. But due to overexposure and misuse, each of these attention-seeking channels has lost their effectiveness with consumers. These channels now sit squarely in a consumer’s blind spot because, along the way, we opted to solve for quantity, not quality in scaling our outreach. This depreciated the experience a consumer has with your brand, which resulted in diminishing returns for businesses. 

It’s no wonder that 65% of direct mail ends up in the trash.

The experience you deliver to your gift recipient is what yields increased engagement and higher conversions. The right solution for sending dimensional mail will prioritize the experience of your gift recipient above all else. These companies go out of their way to make you look like a rockstar to your prospects and customers. At Alyce, we don’t just provide you with an exceptional experience: we provide you with an exceptional experience for your audiences.

In other words: We make you look like a rockstar to your prospects and customers. 

How Alyce Turns Direct Mail into a Personal Experience

When you prioritize the experience over the send, you turn a stale, one-to-many “touchpoint” into a one-to-one moment. The traditional direct mail channel treats your prospects and customers as numbers giving them little to no reason to build an emotional bond with you or your company. This lack of emotional attachment introduces friction to your funnel, causing longer sales cycles and increasing churn.

When you prioritize the experience by making it personal, your outreach puts the gift recipient at the center of your engagement – not you.

🎁 Want to learn how to drive more conversions out of your gifting strategy? Read our eBook: “The Ultimate Guide to Driving Conversions with your Gifting”

At Alyce, we are focused on helping you make every single interaction you have with your audience as one-to-one as possible. The more one-to-one your outreach, the better you can build bonds. That bond – or personal connection – is your key to higher returns from your account-based marketing efforts. 

The 5 Differences Between Alyce and Direct Mail Solutions

#1: Alyce offers performance-based insights 

Traditional direct mail solutions can make an impression, cut through the clutter, and rise above the noise. The question is: does what you send, drive your prospects to action?

That’s where Alyce really shines. Our platform goes well beyond attention; we spur action. Our platform helps you appeal to your recipients through the end-to-end personal gifting experience. Designed for increased open rates on digital gift invitations, improved conversion rates on gifts, and more meetings booked, the platform is all about helping you achieve the results you need while solving for efficiency and scale. 

#2. Alyce helps you scale your account research

It can be tricky to break into the right accounts and even more tricky to get in front of the right person at the right accounts.

Alyce automates personal research to recommend unique gifts for each of your chosen recipients. By leveraging someone’s personal interests, or their #5to9 interests, Alyce offers extends the rapport you need to start a conversation. The right rapport creates bonds and those bonds earn the most important variable during the sales process – trust. 

Trust isn’t earned by sending cupcakes or coffee cards.

#3: Alyce gives your prospects The Power of Choice

When you use Alyce, your gift recipients also get the Power of Choice.™ The Power of Choice™ offers flexibility to your gift recipients by allowing them to accept what the personal research has suggested, swap the gift from a marketplace of 1000+ gifts, or donate the value of the gift to a charity close to their heart. 

Not only does this elevated experience make sure your audiences get exactly what they want, but you also gain more intel about your prospect’s personal interests. The newly selected gift or the charity they select grants you deeper insight into what makes your prospect or customer tick.

It also means no wasted materials for the environment – and no wasted revenue for you.

#4: Alyce makes gifting cost-effective

With most traditional direct mail providers, the cost is all upfront. So if you’re reaching out to 1,000 prospects, you’re paying to buy, store, and ship 1,000 items. What does that do? It ties up your resources. Additionally, since most companies can’t track the item beyond delivery it ties up your sales team chasing phantom leads. 

With Alyce, you only send invitations and fulfill accepted gifts. And because Alyce ties the physical and digital worlds together, we can require actions and track results for all invitations. We save you time, money, and effort of picking the low-hanging fruit. It makes for a more efficient flywheel.

#5: Alyce improves engagement at every stage of the buyer journey

It’s difficult to make someone want to download your ebook, register for your digital event, or take a survey. Automated gifting software offers solutions for every phase of the buyer’s journey to increase the performance of your campaigns and programs.

Improve engagement rates at events by offering a gift to your attendees who participate. Reward your customers for hitting a major milestone. Expand existing accounts by sending gifts to stakeholders in new business units. The options are endless for you to start building bonds through Alyce.

Stop Sending and Start Bonding

Business. It’s personal.

If you’re ready to take your sales and marketing outreach to the next level and ditch the automated campaigns that are causing us all to opt-out, contact our sales team. Consider it a gift to you, and your marketing and sales teams.