Selling Through Direct Mail Marketing – Step 3: Consistency

Two parts of mailing consistency

Mailing consistency – The more you can get in front of your audience, the more successful you’ll be. By mailing consistently your audience recognizes you, gets to know you, and are more likely to purchase from you. Research shows that sales are closed after seven to nine touches. Meaning, if you send out a postcard campaign you’ll be far more effective sending seven as opposed to one.

There are multiple ways to ensure that you are getting the most out of your mailer. One common method is to create a continual campaign, one that builds upon the last. For example, Brent is a freelance financial advisor and is currently working on growing his list of clients. He knows that word of mouth and networking are highly effective in his industry, but he wanted to try a new approach and send out a direct mailer campaign to his ideal clients. His first mailer was an introduction to himself and his services. The next mailer talked about one of his services in more depth, the next did the same with two of his other services. The third mailer advertised his free financial consultation.

His campaign continued in this type of pattern, sending out a total of eight. After the third mailer he started booking many consultations. After each consultation he sent out special thank you mailers. He found the campaign to be very effective and has many new clients because of it. Multiple step campaigns also allow you to test and measure the success of your mailers (which we will talk about more in depth below). The goal of mailing consistency is to stay present in your audience’s mind. In order to get the most out of mailing more than once you must have brand consistency.

Brand consistency – The first part of brand consistency and the easiest step to implement is: always be consistent with your colors, fonts, and graphics. Doing so will make your brand recognizable to your audience so that at first glance they know who you are and what you do or sell. For example, McDonalds became one of the most highly recognizable brands in the world because of the golden arches (except in Sedona, AZ where they are turquoise).

The second part requires a little more effort. Brand consistency relies heavily on having consistent messages, values, and mood. This allows you to engage your customers on an emotional level. You want your customers to feel your product or service – whether it is a warm and fuzzy feeling or a feeling of urgency. Consumers who have that emotional connection are far more likely to recognize your brand colors and graphics. In turn they are most likely to call you over a similar company.

Testing and Measuring

Testing and measuring allows you to perfect your campaigns and increase your success. After you send out one mailer you can test the results to see how successful it was. If it was successful you can tweak it a little in the call to action, the offer, or the headline. For example, if the first mailer offered a buy one, get one deal offer 20% off in the second. Or instead of using a return mailer, prompt people to go online or follow you on social media. After each mailer you can record the results and measure how successful each one was. Once you have all of your data, you can look and see which offers, call to action, and headlines were most effective on your audience. This not only creates consistency and recognition, but you now have the opportunity to perfect your direct mail marketing, which will in turn allow you to be even more consistent with future mailings.

Brand consistency and recognition does not happen over night. It takes some companies years to find brand consistency that works for them. Click2Mail takes some of the work out by offering you a very simple way to send direct mailers. For more on how to sell through direct mail marketing, stay tuned for step 4 in next month’s newsletter. Until then, we are available online at Click2Mail.com or by phone at 1-866-665-2787.