Keys to effective mail campaigns

Your customers are being inundated with mail and email from near and far.  Be BOLD.  Your message needs to stand out to have a better chance to be acted upon.  

HIGH LEVEL OF PERSONALIZATION & RELEVANCE - why throw the same generic offer out to everyone on a list and have their name/address appear surrounded by bar codes?  We offer better solutions.  We give clients almost limitless personalization possibilities and the ability to create multiple versions of an offer to make it more relevant to each recipient, across a wide array of formats and sizes.  Technology is changing rapidly.  What was cost prohibitive or simply impossible a year ago is neither, today.

OUTSTANDING GRAPHICS - the brain interprets graphics 60,000x faster than it decodes text.  Don’t just print and cheap, stock color images, print images that are bright, vibrant and engage. 

ENGAGE MORE SENSES - the more senses you can activate a response from, the deeper the message is embedded for the recipient.  Print is visual, but it’s also tactile. We offer clients a unique variety of ways to deeply activate more senses and get noticed.

MAKE IT EASY - allow recipients to respond without adding layers of work or confusion.  Why ask someone to fill out their name/address/phone number when you already gave that info?  Personalize all you can to make response easy.

DATA DRIVES SUCCESS - accurate data avoids embarrassment and wasted printing and postage costs.  Incomplete data can mean opportunities are lost.  Just because someone once listed a name and address on a list - whether it be your customer/prospect list or a purchased list - it doesn’t mean its accurate.  All mailers use the postal service’s National Change Of Address (NCOA) database to get updated addresses for recipients that have recently moved.  We like to go several steps beyond just NCOA, using proprietary software and databases to check every recipient record for accuracy.  Even if a client is giving us their list own trusted list of customers and prospects, it is not uncommon that we find 3%-10% of this trusted address data contains errors.  Addresses that don’t exist, addresses that do exist but the recipient may not live there.  

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Bad data wastes postage and printing and handicaps ROI.  So can having to compromise on making a piece smaller or thinner or having to settle for lower-resolution, cheap-looking color that does not become your brand.  Instead of compromising your next campaign, maybe it’s time to work with a different direct mail partner.  Let’s talk…

Mail or eMail - what works best?

Some people refer to direct mail advertising as ‘junk mail’.  But smart marketing professionals know that it’s anything but junk, when they’re trying to connect directly with possible new customers, or rekindle a relationships with previous customer. 

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The Direct Marketing Association (thedma.org) is a great source for direct marketing information and trends.  According to the DMA, across all campaigns, direct mail’s average response rates are 5.3% for house lists and 2.9% for purchased prospect lists.  These are not ‘click’ or ‘open rates’.  They are the average percentage of recipients who responded by actually buying, ordering, donating, subscribing or whatever other positive outcome the advertiser hoped for.  Not just looking at an image or offer, but generating return on investment.

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By contrast, the average click rate is 1.6% for business-as-usual email campaigns. That is measuring the opening and viewing the content of an email - not responses.  A fraction of that fraction has potential to become a respondent. Click rates improve dramatically to 6.5% if the email has been triggered by other events rather than sending a cold email. Better, but we’re still talking ‘clicks’, not true responses.

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Of the two, eMail is, without a doubt, cheaper and quicker to deploy.  Traditional Direct Mail has the expenses of print and postage, along with needing more time to produce and reach the audience via the postal service vs clicking ‘send’. But our job as marketers isn’t to see who can spend less or see how many clicks, views or likes we received.  Our job is to bring a high return on investment to the advertiser, meeting or beating their expectations. 

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So which is better:  eMail or traditional Direct Mail?  The answer is: neither  They need to be viewed as complementary. A well-coordinated campaign of traditional Direct Mail and eMail, solid targeting and data will yield a better ROI than either channel can separately.  It’s time to stop looking at eMail and traditional Direct Mail as separate options for your next campaign and start discussing how to deploy both, together.

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We can show you how…

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