Omnichannel Marketing for Your Nonprofit: Why Direct Mail Still Matters

Digital marketing is essential to reaching supporters worldwide, raising awareness for your cause, and maximizing your fundraising potential. Because email, social media, and text are so economical, attainable, and effective, the nonprofit industry has long predicted the demise of direct mail. Despite a decade of doomsaying about its costs and challenges, the reports of direct mail’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

In fact, still alive and well, direct mail marketing should be combined with digital marketing as part of your modern marketing strategy, leveraging the best of both channels. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of employing an omnichannel strategy that targets supporters online and offline.

But before we do, let’s address the most common concern about direct mail—the costs. According to the Association of National Advertisers, paper-and-postage outreach is likely worth the expense. Direct mail offers the highest return on investment (ROI) for individual media at 161%.

Direct Mail Defeats Inbox Fatigue

While your donors may receive hundreds to thousands of emails a week, direct mail is much rarer. And with the resurgence of physical media, supporters are seeking more tangible ways to connect with organizations. According to a United States Postal Service report, 72% of teenagers and 20-somethings are excited to discover what the mail delivers every day.

Direct mail gives donors a break from their inboxes. It’s a refreshing way for them to ditch their screens and focus their attention on your cause wholeheartedly. Plus, a physical reminder of your brand feels more personal, helping you build deeper relationships with your target audience.

By using both direct mail and digital marketing, you can still unlock the strengths of reaching donors online—such as urgency and ease of giving—while simultaneously leveraging direct mail to more effectively tell stories, create a tactile touchpoint, and build trust.

Direct Mail Familiarizes Audience Members with Your Brand

Direct mail is one of the most effective marketing and fundraising channels and delivers outstanding ROI, but it’s also one of the most expensive options due to rising postage costs. In July 2025, mailing service prices increased by about 7.4%, and in January 2026, the USPS increased costs for various shipping services.

To avoid squandering your marketing spend, leverage donor data to reduce direct mail costs and try using digital ads as a low-cost warmup for your mailings. By preceding direct mail with digital ads, you prime the audience member to recognize your branding and familiarize them with your message so it fully resonates when they view the subsequent direct mail.

This strategy relies on a psychological concept called the mere exposure effect. People prefer things that they’re familiar with, and the more they’re exposed to something, the more likely they are to respond well to it. If a current or potential supporter first finds your campaign online via an ad and later receives a mailing with the same imagery and messaging, they’ll view it as a familiar correspondence rather than unsolicited or junk mail. That familiarity often makes them more likely to take action.

Omnichannel Marketing Boosts Donor Response Rates

Donors are busy, which means a piece of direct mail can easily get lost in the shuffle, and an email can get buried in a crowded inbox. However, when you send a donor the same message via multiple channels, you multiply the chance they’ll engage with it.

According to the USPS, when marketers combine direct mail and digital marketing:

• They see an average conversion rate of 40%
• 68% see increased website visits
• 60% report an increased ROI

The combination of direct mail and digital marketing reinforces your asks and motivates supporters to follow through. It also provides a variety of information from different sources. To use that data, your organization can engage with an identity resolution service which can combine disparate identifiers into a single customer identity. A more comprehensive, error-free customer record means you can create more effective targeted campaigns.

Identity resolution provided by companies like Deep Sync enables you to move traditional retargeting offline. For example, when a potential supporter visits your donation page but leaves without contributing:

• You can use identity resolution to obtain their Mobile Ad ID (MAID) or IP address
• Resolve it back to their mailing address
• Send them a piece of direct mail reiterating your cause and directing them back to your donation page via a QR code

By this point, they may be more confident in their decision to contribute, and you’ve given them an easy path to return to your website and donate.

You Can Be More Precise with Digital Targeting

When digital advertising relies on cookies or broad interests, it’s difficult to reach your target audience, and you might end up wasting your ad spend. In contrast, address data is verifiable. When you ground your strategy in address data, you know you’re reaching real individuals and households.

Work with a data provider to onboard your offline donor list to digital platforms like Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, Madhive, and The Trade Desk. Onboarding matches the concrete donor data you already have with associated digital profiles. That way, you can target the exact supporters you’d like to reach with both direct mail and digital advertising.

For example, instead of blasting an ad and sending direct mail about your upcoming campaign to a generic audience, you may choose to focus on lapsed donors or major giving prospects. As a result, you can focus your marketing budget on people you know have a propensity to give to your organization.

Start Strengthening Your Connections—Online and Offline

Evaluated as individual channels, digital marketing broadens your reach, and direct mail reinforces connection with your audience. Together, these channels can help you target widely and deeply, spreading your message in a meaningful way with multiple touchpoints that encourage supporters to get to know your brand and become more involved in your organization. Consider how an omnichannel strategy combining both direct mail and digital marketing could help you fortify your marketing results and mission outcomes.