7 Steps to Direct Mail Success

Direct mailing campaigns are a fantastic way to boost a business, receive a return on investment, all in a personalised and tailored way. Follow our 7 Steps to Direct Mail Success to help optimise specific campaigns and improve all chances of success, for the benefit of your business.

Step 1: Audience

The first action that needs to be taken is determining who your target audience is to understand the specifics. Your design, your style of writing, etc, need to be tailored to this audience, to produce a stronger response per mailing ratio. Using your newsletter/mailing list is a great way to further analyse your audience- knowing they are interested in your company and have previously bought/worked with you. Having a more refined and targeted direct mail audience will improve all conversions and make for all-round better campaign.

Step 2: Design

The look of the product is a very important factor of any campaign, as it is the first thing the receiver sees, and needs to grab their attention. The design needs to stand out and be appealing enough that people want to look at it, open it, and act upon it, not throw it away. Being creative allows you to really be experimental with lots of different shapes, sizes, colours and images, which can make the difference between being like any other piece of post, or an interesting mail item.

Step 3: Message

The copy of the mail should persuade the reader to act upon what they’ve read and want to do whatever the intended outcome of the direct mailing campaign was. Focusing the messaging on the benefits of your product/service, how you can solve problems, why yours is the best against competitors, whilst remaining jargon-free, concise and straight to the point, are important when convincing the reader. Trying to be persuasive in as few words as possible is a hard task, but is key when trying to make the most of readers’ attention span and aiming trying to keep your budget to a minimum.

Step 4: Personalisation

Personalised post impacts greatly on the response and open rate of mail. Tailoring mail helps to make a personal connection with the reader, so they feel more cared about and treated as an individual, rather than one of many customers. Using the recipient’s name, and involving unique offers, messages, graphics etc, will make them feel valued, and therefore more likely to engage. The use of synthetic personalisation, where you address mass audiences as though they are individuals through inclusive language techniques, is a linguistic method used by some marketing companies to save inputting time, whilst still remaining personal. Properties of such a technique would include pronouns such as “we” and “our”, or similarly using a more personal or informal tone, through humour and anecdotes.

Step 5: Aim

Creating a CTA (Call to Action) for your campaign will help drive action and convert recipients into customers. Making the CTA clear, yet easy, will help the reader know exactly what they need to do to act upon their “exclusive” offer/deal. Adding a time restriction or exclusivity will make the customer want to act fast in order to avoid missing out. When creating your CTA, your need to think what you want your recipient to do after receiving the mail? Whether it be visit your site, purchase a specific product, get in touch- you will need to create the CTA around this intended outcome.

Step 6: Integration

Direct mail works best when integrated with other marketing channels, such as social media, websites, events and/or email marketing. Multi-channel promotion helps establish a more complete and immersive experience to build a relationship with customers across multiple channels, therefore optimising marketing results, and eventually improving sales. The piece of direct mail should include social media information, website details (on the site should be a newsletter sign-up button), and other pages used by the business, to help the customer keep up to date with the company and interact, but also help build a larger following. 

Step 7: Analysis

You will need to set trackable and realistic goals before the start of the campaign, in order to optimise and improve your strategy. Setting KPIs (key performance indicators) and defining what a successful campaign looks like to you will help you see whether you are on course to achieving these results, or not. You can do this by tracking whether people have responded to your CTA (call to action) through an offer code, landing page, tailored URL etc. By measuring and analysing these indicators, you can assess the areas that are working well, and which other areas will need to be improved. You can also test your target audience before the start of the large distribution by testing the campaign on a smaller audience to see the results on a smaller scale, and plan for the future based around these analytics.

These 7 steps should help you craft a defined, specifics and successful direct mailing campaign. Like most social media campaigns, trial and error is an important part of learning about how customers respond to your company through advertising, and it is how you analyse and put in to practise what you’ve noted, that makes a considerable difference.

We regularly produce and distribute tens of thousands of direct mail items, and our responsive customer service means that we can be relied upon to accurately carry out services and campaigns on your behalf.

If you are looking for more information or want to find out more about the direct mail printing services we can offer, call us on 0845 362 0983. From high impact printed envelopes to bespoke poly-wrapping, we can provide and supply the services you require. We would be delighted to meet with you and discuss your marketing requirements, so call us today!