Direct Mail Advertising works because even in the electronic age people get mail delivered to their homes every day and over 98 percent of them take in the mail the day it’s delivered.
Direct Mail gets your message into people’s homes and can provide businesses an effective way to target specific customers. Knowing your market helps companies save money and pursue viable prospects.
The first place to start your direct marketing campaign is by carefully determining the characteristics of your customers. This way you can tailor your message to match their needs and interests. Understanding why direct mail advertising works will allow you to increase the chances that those potential customers will act on the offer made in your direct mail collateral.
Direct Mail Advertising Benefits
Having a mailing list that is broken down by gender, age, and interests allows you to not only personalize the message, but to focus on small groups of individuals with the same needs and wants and who would be more likely to respond to your offer. For example, you can target married males under fifty for a specific type of product or services and not waste time or money by sending out the ad to those who don’t meet the age or marital requirements.
Having a personal and targeted direct mail piece will really make a difference in your response to the advertising. While people often complain about junk mail, if you address specific interests and target the marketing, 55 percent of the US Postal Service customers have stated that they enjoy looking through the mail they receive.
Offering a physical coupon, sticker or refrigerator magnet allows you to get something tangible into your customer’s hands. This can make an unforgettable impression and will give your potential customer something to hold on to, schedule, or view. These items will often help create a “call to action” for your targeted customers.
Direct Mail Advertising is All About Options
Send out 50 personalized letters with a brochure or 500 postcards, direct mail is flexible. It is easy to use a variety of formats for the collateral, and just as easy to add in special offers to select groups or a free sample of your product in the envelope. Offer coupons to some, stickers to others, and track the results in a number of ways.
You can count those coupons, request callers to give you a code from the flyer or simply vary each offer so you know what campaign they are calling about. Direct marketing is one of the few advertising methods that will allow you to ability to carefully track the success of the dollars spent. It is simple to analyze your results and make adjustments to future campaigns.
Cost-Effective
Your company does not have to have a big budget to incorporate Direct Mail Advertising. You can create a professional direct mail collateral with a computer and simple desktop publishing software. There are direct mail web sites that will allow you to design the mailer, then import the mailing list and have the campaign printed and then mailed from this online source. This easily allows you to have the customer’s name on their piece.
Narrow It Down
The more focused and targeted the direct mail piece, the better it will do. It is important to spend a few minutes defining who you are trying to reach with this specific piece of mail, which also means you need to decide what exactly you are offering.
Often the first direct mail campaign is targeted to existing customers or you get a mail list that mirrors your current customers and the direct mail piece is a message to introduce your products or services. The more narrow the view, the more focused the offer, the easier it will be for customers to be hooked by your piece.
I received a direct mail letter yesterday that was a perfect example of what you don’t want to do…it was three pages of very small type with nothing highlighted. I didn’t even glance at text and have no idea who sent it, I just threw it away. On the other hand, I got an oversized, colorful postcard that went directly into my purse. The offer on it is something I am interested in and the postcard serves as a handy reminder to stop at the store.