The How-To Guide for Effective Direct Mail Marketing

Fail to prepare a decent mixture of marketing tactics, and you really ought to prepare to fail at business. Marketing is an absolutely essential technique to drum up business and boost your overall brand visibility. While you probably already know this, you should ask yourself if the way you're currently going about it is broad enough or relies too heavily on one particular channel (usually online). Direct mail used to be the go-to method before the internet took over most companies' marketing budgets due to the fact that it can generate incredible results when performed correctly. We are looking at what direct mail is for those of you who happen to rely a little too much on digital advertising and how it can help you generate even more revenue when included as part of an overall marketing mix.

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What Is Direct Mail Marketing?

In a nutshell, direct mail marketing involves creating physical advertising materials and mailing them directly to people's homes or businesses. The advantage that this channel has over, say, something like a Facebook or Google ad campaign is that it can be used to promote products, services, and business in a far more personal manner while maintaining a level of cost-effectiveness that can be tricky to achieve as ad rates continue on a never-ending path of cost increases. As long as you utilize highly targeted lists like Cactus Mailing direct mail lists and those of other similar direct mail agencies, you will reap an incredible return on any investment you spend on this channel. It also lends itself to improving your brand's visibility as people are more inclined to at least spend some time reading the mail that hits their mailboxes. Because most folks have also developed a kind of advertising blindness when it comes to digital marketing efforts, the older methods are sometimes more effective.

How to Create an Effective Direct Mail Campaign

In many ways, an effective direct marketing campaign will mirror most of the usual techniques used to market in almost any other channel. This means that you won't necessarily need to retrain your marketing department on how to generate this choice, making direct mail an easy option to get started with.

Understand Your Target Audience

Just as you need to with any form of marketing you opt for, understanding who your target market might be is critical to ensuring that you target those who are most likely to move the needle, so to speak, and reduce your chances of hurting your brand reputation by blasting unrelated mail to those who have never shown any interest in your offerings and simply spending a hefty chunk of your marketing budget on annoying them. When it comes to direct mail specifically, knowing who you're targeting will also enable you to develop fantastic ad copy and designs that resonate. All of this combined makes it much likelier that you will gain more business and revenue.

Craft Compelling Messaging That Resonates

Following on from the latter point made in the previous section, compelling messaging is perhaps even more crucial when it comes to direct mail than other options. This is because, in some ways, you only really have one shot at it, and when compared with digital techniques, you can't just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. If you don't have an in-house marketing team to assist you with this, it's wise to outsource the task to marketing agencies, who are most able to craft the sort of copy that works.

Design Eye-Catching Mailer Layouts

Eye-catching doesn't have to mean garish. We just wanted to pop that note in first, as far too many people will conflate those terms with over-the-top designs out of the desire to catch the eye and make an immediate first impression. This can work perfectly well for some businesses, but for most, eye-catching means tidy layouts and obeying many of the most common principles of advert design (many of which have been developed and honed over the course of a century or more).

Choose High-Quality Materials for Impact

If you want to make the biggest splash, then looking at the materials you choose when developing the postcards could make a massive difference in outcomes. For example, while opting for thicker stock or features like embossing, etc., might cost you more than simpler options, the extra cost could result in a much higher conversion rate by virtue of creating a good impression. When people sift through the endless number of letters they typically receive each day, finding an incredibly high-quality postcard or flyer could cause the dopamine hit that nudges them to take action. You will need to make a judgment call based on what you are offering. If you're simply aiming to gather more customers for your local dog-walking business, then you might not need to spend too much on fancy paper stock, while a company offering an expensive service or product may do better from the added investment.

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Integrate Direct Mail with Digital Strategies

Just because you want to try out a new marketing method doesn't mean that you have to abandon other options. In fact, combining this form of physical, real-world marketing with online ones can yield much better results overall. One option could be to use the ubiquitous QR code on your designs that a potential customer can scan, which takes them through to your website. If you really want to go the extra mile and make sure that people take action on your offers, present them with some sort of discount or saving. This will have the added advantage of helping you track what designs are having the most impact. If you set your analytic software up correctly, you will get an excellent overview of how many people have taken action on your offer and based on which designs. It will take some work to set it up properly, but the payoff can be incredible.

Maintain Consistency with Branding

If you're all over the palace with your branding, you will only serve to confuse potential customers and make yourself less recognizable. This means using the same colors, themes, and fonts throughout your different designs so that when you have a new offer to promote, people will already be accustomed to your brand and more willing to take action.

Direct mail is a brilliant addition to any marketing campaign as long as you know how to carry it out effectively. This post has offered a few tips to get you started, but to achieve the best results, you will need to refine things further based on your business and desired outcomes.