Targeting Your Campaign: Every Door Direct Mail Postal Routes vs QuantumPostcards Demographics

While the design and content of your direct mail postcard can have a huge effect on its response rate and profitability, no amount of eye-catching design or persuasive copy can make up for poor targeting.

In this post, we’ll compare two companies offering different levels of targeting for small business owners: the broad, route-based targeting offered by Every Door Direct Mail of the USPS, and the pinpoint targeting offered by QuantumPostcards.

Why targeting matters

Imagine sending a postcard advertising mortgage refinancing to someone that rents their home. What about sending a brochure offering retirement planning services to a neighborhood populated mostly by college students?

No matter how perfect your design is or how carefully optimized your copy may be, the primary factor determining whether or not your direct mail campaign produces the results you want is its targeting.

Simply put, if you don’t aim at the right target, no amount of marketing firepower will help you achieve your goals. Because of this, it’s important to understand the different types of targeting that are available to small businesses.

Route-based targeting

Who lives in your neighborhood? For most of us, our neighborhoods are a broad mix of people from different backgrounds, in a variety of life stages. From students to families to retirees, the average neighborhood is home to many different people, each with different interests and priorities.

These people often have different goals in life, different hobbies and – a factor that’s most important to small businesses – different consumer needs and disposable income levels. In simple terms, there’s no commonality aside from location.

Route-based targeting allows you to send your direct mail postcards using a postal route (or several postal routes) as your targeting criteria. Every home in the target postal route, from a small apartment to a large estate house, will receive one.

For the most part, route-based targeting is not the most efficient or effective way to get your message out there. Since you’re delivering postcards to every address in an area, you can’t target people based on characteristics like income, age, family size and more.

This doesn’t mean that route-based targeting doesn’t work. Route-based direct mail targeting can be worthwhile for offers that appeal to a very large audience.

This means that if you’re advertising a local food delivery service – something that just about everyone could potentially buy – route-based direct mail targeting from a company like Every Door Direct Mail could be a cost-effective option.

Demographic targeting

While route-based targeting could be a good option for your food delivery business, is it likely to be as helpful for an offer like mortgage refinancing, accounting services, or early childhood education?

Each of these services targets a very specific audience. The first targets homeowners and is of no value to renters. The second targets business owners and is of far less value to the average employee. The final offer targets parents of young children.

Promoting these offers through direct mail requires targeting a very specific type of audience. An early childhood offer targeted to parents, for example, will not only cost less and distribute less paper, but will also generate a much higher response rate compared to a far more broad, route-based campaign.

Services like QuantumPostcards allow you to target your direct mail postcards so that they’re only delivered to the people you want reading them, letting you leave people outside your target market out of your campaign.

The results are obvious: a higher response rate, a more profitable campaign and a far greater number of sales leads from your postcards. Because of this, small businesses with an offer that targets a specific audience should use demographic targeting to make the most of their precious marketing dollars.

Which option will you choose for your next campaign?

Both route-based targeting and demographic targeting have their advantages, but the huge benefits of demographic targeted direct mail generally make it the better choice for small business owners. Which option will you choose for your next direct mail campaign?