Practical guides
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Practical guides
Direct mail
What to do to really make it work
When used properly direct mail is a powerful tool because it gives you direct access to your target customers. Our experience shows that doing the following will make your direct mail produce results:
- Make your message short, clear and to the point; remember the 5 second rule - no A4 paper or 8pt type
- Always include a letter with a brochure - statistically, it will improve the response.
- The first thing people read in your letter is the Subject at the top and the PS at the bottom, so these must both convey your message in a concise way.
- Make sure that your mailings focus on benefits that your customers are going to receive.
- If you get a good response from a mailing and repeat that mailing two or three weeks later, you are likely to get another significant response of around 50% of the first mailing.
- Consider the break-even concept. This involves using direct mail to target new customers - even if the mailings only break even and provided that a percentage of them do repeat business, it can be a very effective way to grow your customer base rapidly.
- Test and measure everything. This is the only way to determine with precision whether your campaigns are successful and should be rolled out on a larger scale.
- Start testing a new campaign with a small number. Depending on the size of your business this may be a few hundred or a couple of thousand - and make sure you can cope with the response level.
- The best place to start increasing your direct mail is with your existing customers and clients. How often do you mail them and what would happen if you increased this?
- Direct mail is statistically predictable. If you send out 2000 letters and get 20 responses, you can predict that if you send out 4000 letters (to the same group) you will get in the region of 40 responses. However, if you send out 2000 letters and only get one response, it would not be profitable to send out 4000 letters!!
- Make sure the data is clean - don't waste money mailing to the dead.
- Put a return address - if not you won't know whether it has been delivered.