Bad Direct Mail Campaigns, Mistakes To Avoid

Top Direct Mail Mistakes Companies Make and How to Prevent Them

Your direct mail item may be the first touchpoint in your marketing funnel.

Thus, making an excellent first impression in front of your audience should be your primary goal.

Your mailings must intrigue prospects and make them remember your messages and offers. And you can only achieve this goal by preventing direct mail mistakes before, during, and after the campaigns!

Here are the ten common mistakes you may encounter:

Poor Direct Mail Planning

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Proper planning will be the difference between success and failure.” 

This quote applies well to all marketing strategies, primarily direct mail. You can note the direct mail marketing mistakes to avoid in advance, aligning your goals with the actual results.

Marketers must set measurable goals they can use as a guide or framework for their campaigns. For example, imagine your company wants more sales for your new summer collection.

What would be your goal?

#1 Generating more sales by sending direct mail items

Or

#2 Targeting families with teenage children in the upstate area of New York City to get a 20% boost in sales

The first goal is vague, paving the way for many other direct mail mistakes that can drown your campaign. You must move ahead with an upfront objective, similar to the #2 goal.

Use this checklist to avoid direct mail mistakes and gather all the information you need:

• Mailing volume
• The primary goal
• Targeted buyer persona
• Design
• Location
• Campaign dates
• List source
• Mail class
• Fulfillment strategy
• Printing partner
• Mailpiece type
• Mailing frequency
• Triggers
• Budget

If you have planned the above elements, you are good to go! For assistance, you can try PostGrid’s direct mail services, which offer the best tech tools and features to raise your campaign’s performance. Hence, you can prevent direct mail mistakes without going through any extra processes or spending more time.

Unfiltered Targeting

Every direct mail piece costs you for printing, ink, postage, handling, and more. But direct mail mistakes keep your items from reaching the correct audience.

Sending mail to the wrong people affects your ROI and tarnishes your image. Imagine promoting children’s clothing to adults or sending B2B business letters to individuals.

It shows you don’t care about your audience or didn’t take the time to do your homework.

So, how can you manage these direct mail marketing mistakes to avoid preserving your brand’s reputation?

Here are three easy ways:

• Define your buyer personas properly.
• Filter out irrelevant or unlikely prospects.
• Update your lists to add hot leads you can target through the campaign.

Please consult your marketing and sales teams to avoid direct mail mistakes and determine your audience’s traits. It saves you more time, money, and labor than you imagine.

PostGrid’s direct mail services let you build targeted mailing lists to send custom mailers. Thus, you can market your brand to the prospects who are most likely to convert based on their geo-demographics.

Confusing Design Decisions

Your direct mail items are your canvas to present your products or services.

You may add images, infographics, bullet points, and other elements to make your pieces visually appealing.

However, many design decisions become significant direct mail mistakes for businesses. Some of their layouts, pictures, or colors confuse their audience.

For example, printing white text on a black background can look off.

You should always print brighter colors on lighter backgrounds to maintain the contrast. Also, prevent common direct mail mistakes by keeping your audience in mind when creating the artwork.

Follow tried-and-tested design tips that work best for marketing campaigns and can impress your recipients. Or you can use PostGrid’s professionally-built templates to create and customize designs based on your preferences.

Failure to Follow the Postal Guidelines

One of the most common direct mail mistakes is failure to follow USPS regulations. It leads to incorrect deliveries, mail returns, and more issues.

You may need to reship many mailers after the Post Office returns them, wasting hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars.

Marketers or marketing freelancers who prepare mailings in-house might not consider aspect ratios, standard sizes, weights, or address placement rules. Hence, they incur common direct mail mistakes that lead to postage surcharges and make the campaign very expensive for the company.

USPS has many guidelines for each direct mail format, mailing class, and more. You can view them on its website or call the Post Office to understand the terms better.

PostGrid’s printing partners prepare your items according to USPS regulations. Hence, shipping something via postal mail has become faster and simpler. Since our network has years of knowledge and expertise, it helps clients avoid direct mail mistakes and send effective mailings.

We handle everything for your business shipments, from the mailing dimensions and region sizes to adding Intelligent Mail Barcodes (IMBs).

Low-Quality Mail Pieces

Direct mail marketing companies have a quality control process toward the end to check things like

• Ink coverage
• Mail elements
• Trimming
• Fonts
• Address blocks
• Offers
• CTAs, and more.

Failing to check these aspects leads to common direct mail mistakes, negatively impacting your campaign’s performance.

Even a tiny grammatical mistake or a low-resolution image on your postcard can create big problems. Mixed-up files, long address lines, and synchronization errors are also direct mail common mistakes you might not notice. The list is endless… You may need to spot-check every little detail before turning your items to the Post Office for shipping.

We understand preventing direct mail mistakes or manually checking high-volume mailers is hard. Hence, PostGrid provides top-notch solutions to automate your campaigns and ensure high quality.

Here’s how:

1. Our API integrations let you fetch data from your CRM and auto-fill the details to prepare the mailers. You can also feed in your contacts, variable data, and other information directly from your system. Since the manual input is zero, there are fewer chances of errors.
2. You don’t print anything in-house. Only select the number of items to print and mail, and leave the rest to us. Our printing partners refer to the USPS rules to create eligible mail items for different mailing classes. Thus, you can better handle direct mail marketing mistakes to avoid without putting in effort.
3. USPS accurately ships your mailers to the addressed recipients within the specified time. You can access the campaign performance reports via your dashboard to measure the results.

Automating your mailing tasks is the easiest way to avoid direct mail mistakes and reduce your workload.

Bad Data Quality

Many companies don’t focus on their data quality until

• They receive mail returns because of incorrect addresses.
• Most mailers go missing transit or arrive at incorrect addresses.
• Their campaign results stay low.

You can prevent these scenarios by working on direct mail common mistakes and cleansing your mailing lists.

Use PostGrid’s direct mail API to maintain data hygiene, delete duplicate records, and standardize addresses. Our address verification API feature ensures your mail items only reach the correct destinations, letting you avoid data-related direct mail mistakes and further issues.

High-quality data also supports your personalization efforts. However, not paying attention to direct mail marketing mistakes to avoid can result in embarrassing situations.

Here’s an example:

Personalization lets you add the recipient’s name to the mail items to get their attention and motivate them to respond.

But what happens when you send a letter or postcard with incorrect names?

It creates a negative impression and frustrates recipients, hampering your brand image.

Luckily, our automated direct mail solutions combine the USPS authoritative data and NCOA files to let you access high-quality lists.

Unclear Messages and CTAs

Your texts must be upfront and precise. Try portraying only one message per mail item to help your audience understand what you want to say and guide them ahead.

One of the most dreadful direct mail mistakes is printing unclear messages and offers.

Please break down your messages and make them easy to digest. Use short sentences and paragraphs to let readers skim your texts without trouble.

If you want to add more content, use a large-sized postcard or a letter. Otherwise, you can provide links to your websites, social media pages, and other resources to offer readers more information.

Another way to avoid common direct mail mistakes is to ditch the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalization does not restrict you to the reader’s first name or location. You may alter the message to make more sense and get better results. Use offers and CTAs that best suit the recipients’ needs.

Improper Follow-Up Mechanisms

Marketers must plan things, like

• How can we measure the campaign’s responses?
• Who will follow up with the respondents?
• Should we conduct repetitive mailings to reinforce our message?

The answers allow them to deal with direct mail marketing mistakes to avoid and stay prepared.

You require a robust follow-up mechanism to let your campaign yield the desired results. It is an excellent idea to avoid direct mail mistakes post-campaign, when most marketers think their work is over.

First, add trackable QR codes and links to your printed items. It lets the recipients respond to your offers and travel ahead of their customer journeys. Also, it enables you to check how many people reply and who they are.

PostGrid’s online mailing solutions let you fight against direct mail mistakes and redirect your campaigns in the right direction. You can use our API or dashboard to create shipments with custom codes and links. Also, you can use the campaign insights and analytics to follow up with the correct people on time!

Inadequate Print and Mail Fulfillment

Many things come into play when conducting a direct mail campaign. You need a graphic designer, printer, shipping vendor, and operator to complete and oversee the tasks.

Partnering with a vendor that does not keep up with its contract can lead to many blunders. These direct mail mistakes may seem uncontrollable, but you can prevent them using a few steps, like

• Asking questions to clarify the vendor’s work,
• Reading online reviews about the company,
• Comparing and negotiating rates, and
• Requesting samples.

Knowing these things lets you control your mailing processes and keep direct mail common mistakes aside.

However, it is daunting and time-consuming to interview multiple vendors and spend weeks drafting contracts. Consider whether a printer or shipping company complies with HIPAA.

PostGrid lets businesses use a more effective way to avoid direct mail mistakes without completing the abovementioned steps. It enables you to collaborate with a reputed PDN (print delivery network) that offers secure, error-free, and speedy services!