Direct mail marketing is basically advertising your products and services through USPS. You can do it through multiple marketing materials, such as postcards, brochures, catalogs, personalized letters, corporate gifts, and other similar mailpieces.
The best-written marketing mails can help your businesses improve your returns enormously. It’s always the best idea to send your mail pieces to the prospects interested in your services or products, rather than the uninterested ones.
Direct mail is the best marketing channel if you wish to target just the decision-makers directly and personally.
In 2013, the Direct Mail Association reported 65% of consumers of all ages have bought through direct mails, so if you’re still living by the notion that direct mail is dead—it’s time you change your opinion.
According to a different DMA report, the average response rate of direct mails for the B2B and B2C market is 4.4%; however, the response rate for emails is just 0.12%. Besides that, USPS revealed that every family that earns $150,000 or more annually has responded to direct mails at least two weeks a month. That means the households respond to around 700 direct mails each year.
If you’re still not convinced, then you should know that direct mails – along with designing, printing, and mailing – costs (per head) almost equal to pay per click and way less than telemarketing. Plus, Print on Demand Institute (PODI) has announced that the direct mail’s response rate can be way higher than any other marketing method, especially when you follow up on your digital marketing campaigns with personalized direct mails.
If you want to increase your direct mail response rate, then understanding the different types of direct mails is very important. When you decide to market your products or services, determine which of the mail forms would be the best for the kind of promotion you are willing to launch.
Here’s a detailed list of different direct mails that you can send your prospects and customers.
If your business runs monthly or yearly subscription services, use transactional mails to inform the customers to renew their subscription or alert the new customers to cancel it.
You can use these mailpieces for notifying customers about new changes in their account details, your company policies, or any other significant security changes. It’s a widespread practice.
With direct mails, you can send invoices, billing statements, order receipts, and checks so your customers cannot avoid timely payments.
It’s a notice that the manufacturers send to their customers as a confirmation letter on the completion of building a customized product. You can also send these with PostGrid.
If you’re hosting an event, sale, or want to get your customers to visit your website or store, you can send them personalized postcards.
If you need to launch the campaigns in any size and any format, try flyers and increase your brand awareness.
With brochures, you can introduce your company or organization to 1m+ highly targeted people.
DMA reports, 91% of businesses use catalogs for marketing. Plus, it’s the easiest way to showcase a number of products under a single cover.
Send your customers’ personalized gifts—eventually, increase customer engagement and your brand awareness.
If you want to send exciting offers and discounts to your customers, consider sending them coupons.
If you usually send personalized direct mails on special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries, then direct mails can be very useful for you. With its tangible form, you can have happy customers and more brand loyalty.
No doubt, targeting your right audience is essential for every business. Yet, it’s necessary to say, if you want to save yourself a considerable misspending, then skipping this step could be an unwise decision.
It’s especially true for small businesses and startups. However, it’s not always necessary that if you’re researching your market and audience, then you definitely need to spend big bucks and launch a big project. It’s always prudent to consult a competent research professional, as they know how to deliver your exact audience objective while keeping things within budget.
Here are a few steps that you should include in your marketing to target the right audience.
Your customers don’t necessarily need to talk to your sales representative before making a purchase at your company. They’re wise, intelligent, and know how to find things that’ll benefit them—mainly through referral and reviews. If you’re willing to conduct the market research on your own, then here are some steps that you should follow:
Knowing your target audience is necessary but not enough. You also need to know where your prospects hang out, their interests, how they like to be contacted, what blogs they read, and other similar trends.
To get all this data, you’ll need to group your audience – that you found in the previous step – according to their demographic details – such as age, gender, and location – and psychographic information – such as their hobbies, interest, income, marital status, and others.
Before launching any big campaign, if you decide to conduct a survey, it can help you understand your audience and their needs pretty well. To launch a successful survey, keep a few things in mind:
On PostGrid, we get a lot from our clients, “what exactly is a good direct mail response rate, and how do we calculate it?”
The answer lies in your direct mail marketing objectives, as the response rate is the percentage of the people responding to your direct mails, and the firm, planned, and calculated your objectives will be the better response rate you may expect. To calculate this percentage, all you need to do is divide the number of people who responded to your pieces of mails by the total number of letters you mailed.
For example, if you mailed 10,000 mailpieces and 200 people responded, your response rate is 2%.
2% is always estimated to be the average response rate. Although, it’s necessary to understand when 2% is okay to consider the good response rate.
If you’re sending direct mails to a ready-made mailing list (the one you bought from a company based on a few demographic details of your prospects) and you’ve no prior relationship with the prospects in the contact list, then 2% is a good response rate.
Besides that, if you’re sending free offers to your mailing list, and getting a 2% rate of response, again, it’s okay, as most people tend to respond to free offers more than the paid ones.
However, if you’re sending your mails to an in-house list instead of the ready-made one, then you can expect a response rate higher than the average. It’s not guaranteed, but you can expect more as your audience already know you.
Additionally, if you’re offering your audience a paid deal instead of a free offer, then it’s likely that you may get a response rate lower than 1%. And that’s also the main difference between order generation and lead generation. When the payment is involved, you are directly getting the customers; however, when people respond to free offers, they’re the lead generation. Later based on the follow-ups, you can expect them to convert into paying customers.
Before we get into the details of how to get an astounding response rate, you need to understand what actually is a good quality response rate.
Suppose you get a 2% response rate from campaign 1; however, later on, only 5% of the leads converted into the paying customers, then the net order rate that you got was only 0.1%. On the other hand, if your campaign 2 brought a response rate of only 1%, but 30% of the leads out of it converted into buyers, then your net order response rate was 0.3%.
And hence, the lead quality matters. It’s not always necessary the audience responding to your free offers will actually buy from you in the future. Therefore, you need to take a few extra measures to convert as many prospects as possible, like analyzing your market research, findings, and competition.
Your market research, surveys, and targeting may go in vain unless you analyze your findings before getting overwhelmed by the data you have collected.
Your market research consists of two types of data; one is quantitative details – ranks, ratings, yes, and no customers’ responses – another one is qualitative details like the direct answers to your questions, as mentioned in surveys and interviews. Now, what you have to do is, compare the results you got with the objectives you set or the results you expected.
Later on, analyze your competitors’ marketing. To do this, sign up for their campaigns, study their headlines, taglines, and other material, find out their follow up techniques, and their reasons for sending those direct mails, and why they’re working out for them.
Try implementing these techniques with your current customers or leads who responded.
The next step would be to calculate and know the returns.
Calculating your ROI is a necessary step in your direct mail campaign planning. All you have to do is know a few numbers and details and put them into a formula.
And that’s how you can calculate the returns on your investment. You would also need to track and analyze your ongoing campaigns for a better future response rate along with this ROI calculation. So, here’s a brief for that.
The last thing that the companies should do is not preparing for the responses that’ll start rolling in once their direct mail campaign has launched.
Your team should be prepared to collect the data of responses and sales as well. Some of the best ways to track your direct mails are:
Once you have this setup, your next step is to record the number of responders and sales. Your team should be ready to receive the calls that start coming in. Note what your prospects are calling for:
Ensure your team gets back to the inquiries without any delay.
Depending on the responses you get, your next step would be to follow up accordingly. And at the end, you analyze all of this information to calculate your ROI and your direct mail campaign’s overall performance. It’ll help you improve your future campaigns.
Billions of companies send billions of direct mails, but not every one of them gets read. Hence, you need to make your direct mails stand out the rest, so they can get read. Here are a few practical tips that you can use for your direct mails:
Standard envelopes may reflect their boring personality and may not get read. Plus, if your direct mails have to go through an assistant before they reach your actual prospects, it’s necessary to make them look important or unusual. If you can afford, try sending padded envelopes—they show value.
It’s very unlikely for anyone to throw away a box they found in their mailbox—after all, it evokes curiosity like what can be inside it. This way, your mailer stands out, gets opened, and read. But these mailpieces will also increase your mailing cost for sure.
Now, if you’re sending a piece of mail with “dear prospect” on it, you’re dropping the chances of even your open rate to negligible. After all, nobody likes to be sold. However, if you decide to choose to send your direct mails with their first names on it, or probably in a different font style or handwritten type of font—they’re more likely to stand out in their mailbox and get their attention. If you’re launching a small campaign with only a handful of prospects, you can also sign the letters yourself to stand out, plus you can also add personalized URLs and QR codes.
Printing your direct mail on unique material is another option that you can try to increase your letters’ chances to get read. This technique works like a charm, especially if your direct mails are going to land in the hands of decision-makers. You can try these materials for your letters: wood, plastic, or metal.
Always make your letters scannable with headlines, subheads, colorful small boxes with text, and other designs. Never try to use big text blocks in your mail pieces—people tend to avoid such things with supersonic speed. And your main motto is to get their attention, get them to read your letters, and have them respond to it.
As we always say on PostGrid, people never like to be sold. Hence, the best way to describe your products’ or services’ is to mention their benefits instead of features. You should be advertising their wants; they should connect and feel like they really need it.
No-doubt, it can be tempting to do it all on your own. But if you’re willing to get a better response rate by investing minimum effort, resources, and time you should go for an automated direct mail solution.
It not only helps you save time and resources, but with the on-time follow ups, tracking, regular notifications and reports, automated responses, campaign analysis, dashboard control, team and users management, design, print, delivery services, ready made mailing list, and sending mails only to the verified addresses to drop the misspendigns significantly.
This way, you will save the time and money that you’ll otherwise invest in hiring teams of designers, running back and forth for the print vendors, delivery services, and others. Plus, you also get to save the extra funds on the direct mails that get lost in the way due to wrong addresses and reach twice or sometimes thrice to the same person. Plus, you can also significantly drop the number of returned direct mails.
On PostGrid, we offer all the services mentioned above, including your direct mails’ security, as all of your data will be PIPEDA, PHIPA HIPAA, GDPR & SOC-2 Certified and Compliant with us.
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