Direct Mail Best Practices

Direct Mail Tips

Direct mail marketing is a proven way to grow your business. However, it is important to plan each step of your direct mail marketing carefully to maximize your return on investment.

Here are the direct mail best practices that help you design a profitable direct mail marketing campaign:

Determine your marketing goals:

Before you start designing your direct mail marketing material, determine your marketing objectives. Ask yourself what you expect to achieve from the campaign and how you will measure the results of the campaign. The most important component of planning and executing a successful direct mail marketing campaign is to clearly define a set of objectives.

Generally, the goals of direct mail marketing can be categorized into broad areas:

• create and enhance brand awareness,
• produce high-quality leads,
• boost customer value,
• Get prospects to think of your brand/product
• convert leads into sales
• Nurture existing customers

Once you identify your marketing goals, decide what metrics you will use to measure your direct mail marketing campaign success.  For instance, if you are looking to generate leads, some metrics you can use are to track the number of people who visit your website or store.

Response rate refers to the percentage of prospects who responded to your postcard marketing or other types of direct mail marketing. This is one of the most common metrics to measure the performance of your direct mail program. To calculate this, simply count the number of responses generated by your direct mail and divide by the number of direct mail materials you mailed.

Identify your target audience:

Create your buyer persona based on your industry and product or service. Be as specific as you can when identifying your ideal customers. The factors that can help you create a buyer persona include:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, marital status, and income level),
• purchase behavior (for instance, new car buyers or used car buyers),
• values and attitudes
• the channels they rely on for information
• other criteria such as new movers, credit score, home net worth, personal interests, hobbies, and so on.

Find out your target audience's pain points, needs, and challenges that your product or service can address.

Compiling your target audience's list can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. A target customer mailing list or mailing lists based on zip code, or within a radius from your place of business streamlines your direct mail marketing campaign. A reputable direct mailing services provider like Mail King USA can help you with accurate mailing lists that remove the hassles of creating a detailed list from scratch.

Create personalized messages:

Once you have identified who your ideal customers are and know their pain points, you can get on to designing personalized direct mail marketing materials.
Some ways to personalize are to

• address prospects by their name
• Adding an image that matches the recipient's demographics
• a map that shows the fastest route to reach your business

Focus on the design:

Make your postcards or letters unique and include freebies as a wow factor in your direct mail marketing material. Consult a direct mail advertising company to get ideas on creating stunning and unique designs while deciding on the right size of your direct mail.