Understanding Direct Mail Advertising

Written by Johh Taylor

Understanding direct mail advertising can help you avoid costly mistakes and help you achieve the results that lead to sales success.

Begin by determining your audience for a specific direct mail piece. Do this by getting a firm picture in your mind of your ideal customer. You can do this by talking to the customers you have. Get to know them. One way to do this is to ask them to complete a simple survey. Pay attention and make notes on age, gender, income levels. Look through sales receipts and see what your customers buy, how much they spend and how often they shop.

Formulate a plan for your offer that encompasses who you think will respond to the offer. New customers will likely mirror the ones you have, unless you want to target a specific area that you have noticed aren’t shopping in your store or utilizing your services.

Target Marketing Example

An example of targeting a marketing campaign to new types of customers might be for a company that sells and services air conditioners to a customer base that is generally middle-aged homeowners. They could design and direct a mail piece towards senior citizens, offering a free inspection and low cost start up of their current system. This type of direct mail advertising would allow you to rent a specific mail list and target your direct mail collateral to a precise age group.

With something like this you need to consider what is important to seniors. Safety is an issue so be sure to list benefits such as employee drug testing and background checks. It might be helpful to bullet list the process, the amount of time it generally takes and why the customer would benefit from having your company do the inspection and start up. Make sure you include an easy, fast call to action – like making a telephone call to schedule an appointment for this offer within two weeks.

Make sure it is easy to find and read the company’s telephone number. Consider using larger type face for easy reading and don’t add a bunch of filler to the text. Keep the mailer simple, clean and to the point. It is important to repeat the call to action several times, each time providing the company’s telephone number.

Designing Your Direct Mail Piece

Gather pricing information on several styles. Check out everything from postcards to brochures and letters. You will need to include the cost to design, print, and rent a mail list as well as the cost of mailing. You can often do the designing and printing in house. If the piece is more complicated or the mail campaign very large you may want to consider hiring a graphic designer and/or a writer.

There are direct mail advertising websites that offer simple software that will help you input your mail list, design your collateral, and print and mail the piece to potential customers.

Money Saving Options

Try several test mailers. Once you’ve identified the mailing list and come up with the mailer you want to send, send out the information to small test groups. With each group vary the message or format and then track the results. Once you’ve determined which version of your collateral works the best, use this for the larger direct mail advertising campaign.

Instead of using full color printing, consider using tinted paper or a colored envelope for your mailer. You can also use colored ink only for highlighted key messages. For instance you may want to have only the telephone number for responses printed in red ink. Or you may want the coupon printed in green ink.

Rules and Regulations

Direct Mail campaigns are required to meet specific legal requirements. The state and federal government regulations cover unsolicited mailings. Unsolicited direct mail advertising means that the person receiving the ads hasn’t requested the information you are sending. Since the mailers are sent to lists of unsolicited prospects you need to understand the regulations before you design and send out your advertising. Check the US Postal website for information on these regulations.

Summary

Direct mail advertising offers businesses a fairly inexpensive method to create advertising that generates potentially large profits. There are so many options of mailer types to choose from. It is critical when choosing a direct mail campaign that you work to make the mailer interesting and something that spurs the potential customer to action.

It is important to keep in mind that everyone gets mail. The US Postal Service states that over 98 percent of people collect this mail daily and 77 percent will sort through it immediately. With those numbers a direct mail piece that captures the eye, has a offer that holds a potential customers attention and carries a strong call to action will result in tremendous sales success.

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