Posts Tagged ‘ Testing Direct Mail ’

Save Money When Using Direct Mail


Many mailers planned for a 2% to 3% increase in postage in 2010. The lack of a rate increase means many mailers can take advantage of the surplus budget to increase circulation, especially in acquisition and reactivation efforts. The key to doing this successfully is to “mail smarter.”

One time-tested mailing practice that will help marketers do this is to run a national change of address programs as close to the mail date as possible to get more moves and to meet the USPS Move-Update requirements. This remains the single most effective tool mailers should use to improve response while reducing waste. They should also consider using proprietary change of address (COA) services, but be careful because these are not nearly as good as NCOA COAs. Direct marketers should also run address-level deduping on poor performing segments and use proprietary processes from service providers to ZIP+4 code additional records and to correct records with missing or invalid secondary numbers, reducing postage and waste.

Mailers should also not mail records with potential deliverability problems, such as those that are non ZIP+4 coded, those with a missing or invalid secondary number, especially on poor-performing segments.

They should also apply common suppressions such as do-not-mail, deceased, and prison, and for flats mailers, co-mail or use Add-a-Name to reduce postage. They should also consider leveraging analytical models to better target prospects and determine which customers to reactivate.

In addition, newer strategies include using the Intelligent Mail barcode to get postage discounts, and reactivating only those older customers where an external service provider has intelligence that the person is still at that address. This practice provides up to a 40% increase in response. Marketers can also apply linkage to identify individual duplicates across multiple addresses, consider suppressing mailings to minors and use undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) suppression files that have recently become available. For flats, do not mail any records that fall into the three-digit qualification tier on poor performing segments. There is significant extra postage to mail these. Lastly, select a service provider to help clean up your customer database now.

2010
03/02
CATEGORY
Best Practices for Direct Mail Marketing
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Test?! Test?! We Don’t Need No Stinking Test! Or Do I???


How much junk mail do you receive each day? Do you read it? Toss it?

Now put yourself in the shoes of your direct mail recipients. Avoid direct mail deadly mistakes or your materials will end up in the trash too.

Before you even begin to put your direct mail campaign together, you’ve got to know who your target market is. Are they women? Parents? Young? Old? Understand what motivates them. What are their likes and dislikes?

Write as if you’re talking to them. And even use terms these types of people would use.

But all the fancy graphics and the most beautifully created sentences in the world won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t carefully select the people on your mailing list. If you’re selling adult diapers, you want to target senior citizens…not 23-year-olds.

Tighten your mailing list as much as possible to be sure it’s tailored to your needs. It’s tough to make people believe they need your product and even harder to convince them they need it now. But if you’ve researched your list, you have a higher chance of hitting potential customers instead of the trash can.

You’ve made your list and checked it twice, so-to-speak. It’s the perfect list. Now it’s time to write. Define your objectives before you start writing. Stay focused and hit the points of your objective. If you get off track, your reader is going to stop reading.

Spend a lot of time on your headline. Just remember how you feel when reading mail that comes to you. After you read that headline, do you keep reading? The headline can make or break your direct mail campaign.

Does price really matter? Not unless you know what you’re getting for that price. Hook your reader with all of the product benefits. By the time they get to the end, they should be saying, “I can’t live without that!”

And then you let them in on the price. Even if the price is extremely low, you have to tell potential customers about the product first.

Disclosing this price shouldn’t put people into shock. Is your product priced according to the market? If you’re selling a new teddy bear, it should be priced within reason. Not many people will pay $90 for a tiny teddy bear, right? Truth is, a lot of direct mail goes unanswered because the products are unreasonably priced.

Success! Your potential customer read all the way through your mailing. Now what?

Did you tell the reader what you want them to do? You can’t sell if you don’t tell.

Your readers need a call to action. Tell them to send in the card, call you, etc. Then tell them again.

Once your direct mail is ready to go, test several smaller mailings before sending out a huge chunk. Test each of these mailings by changing a few items when you send them out.

Have two or more sales letters you test against each other. By testing, you will find out which of those mailings are bringing in more responses and – hopefully – more orders.

Stick with the clear winners. Remember the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Direct mail is a waste of money for a lot of people. But it doesn’t have to be for you. Understanding direct mail deadly mistakes — and avoiding them — will lead you to sales success!

2010
02/26
CATEGORY
Best Practices for Direct Mail Marketing
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