Top 5 Factors That Influence Success of a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

What is Direct Mail Marketing?

We’ve all seen it every day in our mailboxes. Direct Mail Marketing is everywhere. You get letters, post-cards and envelopes in your mailbox with a marketing message every day. Direct mail marketing is the entire process of designing a marketing plan using direct mail as a medium to generate leads or sales.

Direct Mail Marketing has been around since the invention of mail! Direct mail marketing has changed over the last hundred years, but the same basic principals are still the same. A hundred years of trial and error has got marketers to a much more scientific approach to direct mail marketing nowadays. Over a hundred years of best practise has pretty much narrowed down the success of a direct mail campaign to 5 factors.

#1 The List

The absolute #1 most important factor in any mailing campaign is the list. You can imagine if you were selling eyeliner, and your list contained 50% males, you would have a very poor list to start from. No matter how good your offer was, or how creative the mailing piece looked, you still be wasting 50% of the mailers sent. The quality, accuracy and relevance of your list to what you’re selling far outweighs any other factors in a success of a direct mailing campaign.

· Ensure your list is targeted to your buyers

· Ensure your list is cleaned of bad addresses

· Ensure your list is verified, people move all the time.

A quality list of buyers relevant to your product or service, which is cleaned and accurate, is an excellent investment in any direct mailing campaign. If you need help sourcing a list, Dare Marketing can help. We can source a direct mail list for you. Just contact us for further details.

#2 The offer

If you’ve already got a great direct mail list, then the next challenge you have to face is coming up with a great offer. The offer drives conversions. It’s imperative that you have a strong offer with any direct mail marketing campaign. Between the quality of your list and the strength of the offer, that probably makes up 80% of the success factor of your mailing. Here are some examples of offers:

· Limited time 10% off

· Buy now, get two for one

· Free gift with purchase

· Sign up now and be entered in a draw for a free gift

· Free ink when you buy a printer

· Free ebook, sign up now.

By far, “FREE” is the best offer you can give. If you can find a way to provide something free of charge with purchase or sign up, this will be a great high converting offer.

Caution: “Free Quote” or “Free Brochure” is not a compelling offer. These are free anyway!

#3 Call to action

Your direct mail campaign must have a strong call to action combined with the offer. If it does not, your prospects won’t know what you want them to do. If you want them to go to your website and fill out a form, then ask them! For example:

Go to www.mysite.comand click on subscribe to get your free ebook
Call 1-800-999-9999 to register for your free insider’s guide
Return the self addresses stamped envelope with the ballot filled out to be entered in the draw for a free vacation.

Make your call to action obvious and direct. Another factor to consider is how hard to make the call to action. If you’re collecting leads and make it really easy to reply, you may get poor quality leads. If you make it really difficult to reply, you will get less leads, but you’ll get better ones. With some trial and error you’ll get the right call to action. If you want to improve lead quality, make it harder to reply, if you want more leads, make it easier.

#4 The Design/Creative

While the design and creative is important, it probably accounts for less than 20% of the success of a campaign. So many people put so much effort into elaborate images and themes and colors, in the design of their mailing piece, when it’s not really a huge factor. Time and money is better spent buying a great list and covering the cost of a “free” offer. They blow the budget on graphic design and don’t spend their budget where it counts. You’re design and creative should be simple and not distracting from the offer. After all, after the list, the offer is the most important factor in a direct mail marketing campaign. Simply show a picture of your product or service in use, or the benefit of your product and service.

#5 The Copy

While great copy can increase the success rate of your campaign, the reality is most people read the offer, the headings and a few bolded points and skip over the rest. The quality of the copy generally accounts for less than 10% of the success of a direct mail marketing campaign. Many people slave over crafting the copy and whether a comma or a semi-colon should be used, or whether to use “you’re” or “you are”, etc. The truth is, it’s not that big a deal. Spend your time on the list and the offer!

Direct Mail Marketing Execution

While not specifically a design factor. Give some consideration to the execution of your next direct mail marketing campaign. Personalizing the envelopes definitely increases the success of your mailing campaign. For this, you’ll need the help of a Lettershop. A Lettershop will take your list, stuff the envelopes and personalize them with your prospects’ name and address. Dare Marketing is a full service Lettershop and will assist you preparing your mailing and printing your envelopes with personalized addresses.

Another factor you may want to consider with your direct mailing campaign is to do a free product offer as a key component of your direct mail marketing campaign. In order to do this, you will need a fulfillment house to receive requests for your free products and send them out to the qualified leads. This is something Dare Marketing will also help you with. Dare Marketing is a full service fulfillment house.

Perhaps your offer includes a rebate form, for example, buy the product and mail in this card for a $50 rebate. This is a great offer to increase sales, as well as, providing the marketer with data on the prospects that took advantage of the offer. This is imperative for any ROI calculation. Dare Marketing will help you with this too. Dare Marketing is a Rebate ClearingHouse. Your rebate redemptions are collected and fulfilled, while you get reports and lead data.

Anytime you’d like a review of your current direct mail marketing campaign, or help setting up a new one, Dare Marketing would be happy to help. Set up a free consultation anytime byclicking here.