Direct Mail Best Practices

From failing to double-check your copy before printing your postcards (and sending out thousands of cards with misspelled headings as a result) to ineffective targeting, every direct mail marketer makes a mistake at some point in their career.

While some direct mail mistakes can seriously affect your campaign, others are easy to avoid with the right preparation. Read on to learn about five common postcard marketing mistakes and how you can avoid making them.

Today’s small businesses have a huge amount of choice when it comes to marketing channels. There’s online, print, radio, television and a huge range of other options to choose from, even for the smallest or newest of businesses.

While other marketing methods may be more glamorous or trendy, one of the most effective ways to raise awareness for your business, create action, and generate real results is by delivering direct mail postcards to your target audience.

From prompt delivery and an immediate impact to value for money, read on to learn how direct mail – and in particular, direct mail postcards – can give your business a steady flow of leads, sales, and loyal customers.

If your direct mail piece fails to capture the reader’s attention, it will fail in all other regards, too. No matter how great your copy might be, it will have no effect if readers don’t make it far enough into your postcard to read it.

So how do you make readers pay attention?

Is your direct mail postcard as effective as it could be? One of the biggest problems many marketers face is optimization. If your postcard already produces profits and drives responses, what reason is there to optimize further?

Optimization is what separates good campaigns from great ones. A careful process of optimization can double, triple or quadruple your campaign’s response rate and result in a massive increase in your return on investment.

That is, if you optimize at all. Far too many marketers, content with any degree of profitability, start expanding their campaign as soon as it’s in the black, leaving an incredible amount of extra potential sales still on the table.

Learn how you can test your direct mail postcard’s key elements – from headlines to calls to action – to increase your response rate and generate an improved return on investment from your marketing budget.

Was your most recent direct mail campaign a success? While many marketers and business owners understand the ins and outs of direct mail, a large number make a common mistake: failing to establish goals for their campaign before launching it. 

Clear, measurable goals can be the difference between launching a successful direct mail campaign that you can optimize and expand in the future, and a campaign that, despite generating a profit, gives you little to no actionable information. 

Discover the importance of setting measurable, objective goals for your direct mail campaign before you start. We’ll also share a simple goal setting framework that you can use to set effective goals for your next campaign.

Marketing is all about choices. Every campaign involves selecting one message over another, choosing one design out of several concepts, and choosing one audience to market to over another. 

One of the biggest choices many direct marketers have to make today is between an older, more traditional marketing channel – direct mail – and its newer and cheaper alternative, email. 

In the choice between direct mail and email, the diplomatic answer – that both email and direct mail are great channels, when used properly – is the correct one. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each can lead to a successful campaign.

That’s the short answer – the real answer is significantly more detailed. We dug into the advantages and disadvantages of both email and direct mail to help you find out which is the most effective direct marketing channel for your business.

If your business is looking to attract new customers, tapping into new neighbors or residents nearby can be a great way to acquire new business and increase revenue.

New homeowner and new mover lists offer opportunities to market your product or service to a fresh set of eyes and ears, and hopefully convert them into long-lasting, returning customers.

There are many reasons why you as a business owner should use a new homeowner or new mover list, and many of them are based on the nature of the service or product your business provides. So, how do you know which list is right for you and your business?

Discover the benefits behind new homeowner and new mover lists to help you decide which list best suits your business.

So, you've decided to begin a direct mail campaign for your small business. Awesome! Direct mail is a great way to reach new customers, or reconnect with past or lapsed ones - all while not breaking the bank.

In order for your postcard campaign to succeed and generate the kind of ROI you’re looking for, you need to know who to send your postcards to. Analyzing your customer base and identifying a set of characteristics that closely describes your current and desired customers is a good start, but how do you get all of your prospects' addresses?

With every postcard order, you are able to pull from our list of over 200 million consumers to find the perfect audience for your postcard campaign. Learn how you can target your perfect customer with consumer mailing lists available on QuantumPostcards.

Who says direct mail isn’t high tech? From QR codes to personalized URLs, today’s direct marketers use modern technology to enhance their campaigns and increase response rates. 

From offering recipients more ways to respond to an offer to providing an online resource to accompany an offline direct mail postcard, technology can be used to enhance almost any direct mail campaign.

Using modern technology to complement and improve your campaign is one of the most effective ways to increase your response rate and generate a higher ROI from each mailing.

Discover three simple but effective ways that you can use technology to improve your campaign’s response rate, better engage your target audience, and more easily track the results of your direct mail campaign.

From an appealing design to effective and relevant copy, the basic elements of your direct mail postcards can have a huge effect on the amount of revenue the campaign generates and the response rate it receives.

Although the basics play a huge role in determining your campaign’s response rate, they don’t make up all there is to an effective campaign. Beyond the basics, a wide range of choices all play a part in encouraging people to respond to your postcards.

If you’ve designed a clean, effective, and engaging postcard and feel it’s time to optimize beyond the basics, try these four tactics to boost your campaign’s response rate even further.