If your direct mail campaigns are already generating good success, why make any changes? It’s important to stay on top of the results of your direct mail marketing because things are always changing. The market changes. Your list changes. Your products and services change. The needs, desires, and demographics of your target audience change. And with those changes can come changes to the impact of your direct mail. Accommodating the changes, and maintaining the success of your campaigns, requires three steps: Measure, Test, and Repeat.
Measure – Measuring is a way of evaluating what your target audience wants and how effectively you are giving it to them. For example, when Jan came to us, her investment company had been doing email marketing for a few years. They were very committed to measuring their results and had felt the results were good, until they began to notice dramatic decreases in their results. They decided to implement an integrated email and direct mail marketing campaign. They sent out a direct mailer and followed it up with an email. The campaign boosted their overall response rate (response to both the mailer and the email) and the mailer boosted the effectiveness of the email as well.
Test – In direct mail, testing is about making incremental changes to your mail campaign to see if those changes improve response. Committed to direct mail marketing, Joe and his lumber company had been using us to send mailers for many years. They would purchase a resident mailing list and send out jumbo postcards to male-headed households in their area. They felt they had good success: good response rate, positive ROI. Then they heard about Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) and wondered if they could achieve the same (or better) success with less money? So they decided to test EDDM, measuring the response to that campaign in comparison to their standard campaign.
Repeat – Good marketers never settle. Because the factors that determine the success of your direct mail campaign are frequently changing, you’ve got to stay vigilant about measuring the results of every campaign and frequently testing new ideas (think of it as a challenge to beat your best results).Ed, for example, owns a consumer electronics store, and knows firsthand how quickly technology – and technology tastes – change. With marketers “going mobile” in droves, Ed was unsure if his measured, tested, and repeated direct mail strategy was still the most effective. So he decided to test a new method. As opposed to his usual 5″ x 8″ postcard, Ed sent out a 6.5″ x 9″ Every Door Direct Mail mailer with a QR code that linked to his mobile website. When he measured the results he saw a 10% increase in business from the previous month and, because he spent less money, a higher ROI.
So measuring, testing, and repeating caps off our seven steps to selling through direct mail marketing. With the first six steps –understanding the market and your audience, giving your audience what they want, being consistent, focusing on ROI, having a strategy, and integrating mail with your other marketing tools – you should be well on your way to successfully selling through direct mail marketing. When you’re ready to launch your direct mail marketing campaign, we’re here to help.
