The 4 Responsibilities of an Effective Direct Mail Piece :: Small ...

Have you tried direct mail marketing with limited or no success? I hear a lot of small business owners and even marketers talk about direct mail as if it?s a dead media that?s too expensive and never works.

You know what ? I can?t play the guitar very well. I haven?t devoted the time to it. I can kinda work out ?More Than Words? by Extreme but I can?t get anyone to clap for me.

Doesn?t mean the guitar doesn?t work.

Direct mail?s the same way. If you don?t understand it and how to make it work, don?t blame the media. You can?t beat some of the benefits that direct mail offers you, including the greatest selectivity of prospective recipients and the fact that it?s one of the most testable forms of media there are.

You can send different variations of a promotion to small groups to determine which variation gets the best response. Then you can roll out the large scale campaign based on the winner.?That?s going to be a topic for another time, though.

Down to the very essentials of getting direct mail to work, your pieces have to fulfill these 4 Essential Responsibilities:

1. Get delivered
2. Get opened
3. Get read
4. Get response

Getting delivered has to do with knowing who you want to send it to and using appropriate postage to ensure a piece arrives at its destination. I know that sounds pretty basic, but realistically, this also means having a well selected and well maintained list with good addresses. You?ll also want to avoid bulk rate postage if possible, because the USPS (while improving) has tons of horror stories of postal carriers avoiding delivery of bulk mail to finish their routes quicker. They?ve actually busted entire storehouses with hundreds of bags of undelivered mail.

Getting opened requires strategy. Sometimes you?ve got to sneak up on your recipient using an unassuming, hand addressed, hand stamped envelope that appears nothing like a business communication. Sometimes you can find the exact thing to say on the outside of that envelope or postcard that?s compelling enough to make them open it. Or, your recipient might have been previously notified about it and you could include a message like ?The information you requested is enclosed.?

Getting read and getting response requires additional strategy and copywriting skill. You?ve got to offer a compelling reason to start reading and a compelling reason to respond to your offer or invitation so that the largest number of potential prospects answer your call to action.

As an additional word of advice, sometimes people get discouraged when they only get a handful of people responding to their mailings. Realistically, what needs to be considered is how much business that handful of people are worth to you. If the amount of revenue generated is greater than the cost of the mailing (either the single mailing or the entire campaign) ? it?s a success. Tweak it and improve your results, and you?ve got a bigger success.

Perhaps the best advice I can offer about highly responsive direct mail is to tailor your approach so that your calls to action are appropriate to the stage in the relationship you have with that lead, prospect, or existing client. ?What I mean is, if a person?s never heard of you before, asking them to purchase might be too much of a commitment and therefore present a high barrier to response. ?If you instead make the next step something very easy to do without much commitment, like visiting a website or calling a toll-free number to listen to a recorded message (which yes, still works these days) without fear that some salesperson is going to pounce on them, you?ll get better response.

Source: http://marcenriquez.com/2011/08/the-4-responsibilities-of-an-effective-direct-mail-piece/

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