Direct Mail Best Practices
To be effective, marketing has to get inside the mindset of whomever your product or service is trying to reach, a best practice that's no different for direct mail campaigns. Before sending any kind of mailer, it's important to take a step back and think about the people that drive your business.
It’s that time of year again! And no, we’re not talking about Halloween, or even Thanksgiving (however fun those are). It’s time to plan how you’re going to end your organization’s year.
The holidays provide a much-needed excuse for offering a sale, creating an event, reminding someone of an appointment, or requesting a donation. In other words, it's the perfect time to re-energize that relationship between your organization and the people who keep it running. Direct mail postcards are a great way to reach out and stand out from competitors during this busy time.
Audience is at least 40 percent of the equation in developing a successful direct mail campaign. Your messaging, offer, and design are also important, but using a targeted mailing list is critical. Mailings sent to the wrong people are likely to result in a waste of time and poor use of budget on your end. However, when targeted the right way, direct mail postcards offer response rates significantly higher than response rates from digital media, according to the DMA Response Rate Report 2016.
Last year, 11.6% of the entire U.S. population moved. While some moved within the same community, it is far more common for people to move to new areas in a city, new cities, new states, or even overseas. For many businesses, this means losing customers as people leave the area. However, in most geographies, new prospects are arriving to replace the recently departed. For high job-growth areas such as Texas (home to 4 of the 5 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. right now), new people are moving in literally every minute. When a person moves to a new area, they typically shed products/services from their last home -- either to physically make room or because a service, such as banking, isn’t available in the new location.
Savvy businesses seize the opportunity to target new movers, both to create awareness for their brands among a new pool of prospects, and to acquire new customers.
Many businesses begin direct mail marketing to drive brand awareness, to increase demand for their products and services, or to nurture customer relationships. When beginning any new campaign, it’s important to be specific regarding the outcomes you intend to achieve and to have a measurement plan in place before you get started. Pre-planning your measurement approach will help to ensure you are ultimately able to judge the effectiveness of your campaign and are not missing out on valuable insights that could be used to make your marketing strategy even more effective in the future.
In a world where digital technology has changed everything, the power of direct mail marketing is often overlooked – and that’s a shame, because direct mail marketing is one of the single most powerful marketing tools available to modern businesses.
In today’s technology-driven world, brands continue to increase their use of online marketing techniques. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a discussion of modern marketing practices that does not favor digital marketing tactics. However, direct mail remains an extremely effective form of marketing that drives measurable ROI, and thus a powerful tool for the modern marketer. Beyond its intrinsic benefits, direct mail used in conjunction with online marketing can make both methods more powerful.
You might know a little bit about your customers, but do you know enough to really maximize the way you’re communicating with them? Probably not, according to a recent study. Although a whopping 80 percent of B2B marketers know which of their customers are most valuable, according to the State of B2B Marketing 2016, there are many areas where marketers are less clued in, including demographics.
If you don't know where you're going, how do you know when you get there? This same question can be asked about your marketing. How do you know if your marketing is effective if you don't know what you want to accomplish?
As we and other businesses begin rolling our plans for the new year, it's important to reflect on what we've done well and where we can improve. The following 5 blog posts fall in the "what we've done well" category as they've been the most popular with our readers. With topics relating to direct mail, business cards, and integrating with technology - we bet you'll learn something new to help you stand out among your competition!
