Useful Direct Mail Marketing Tips

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Are you looking for an effective way to market your products to consumers? While most businesses turn to social media and digital marketing, direct mail is still an option for increasing business awareness.

This effective strategy involves sending promotional mail to potential customers to their home mailboxes, such as flyers, postcards, letters, and brochures. Such advertising is the perfect choice for targeting particular demographics.

The design of the mailers is essential in encouraging prospects to take action and at least get in touch with your business.

We hope the following direct mail marketing tips will assist you in your campaign.

Understand your target audience

The inceptive step in creating a direct mail campaign is understanding your target audience. It is almost impossible to create a successful campaign without targeting the right consumers, regardless of whether these are businesses or individuals. Your mailing list can be based on factors like age, income, geographic location, voter registration, etc. Some businesses even select recipients in accordance with their employment status and education level.

Additionally, the mailing list is of the utmost importance in direct mail campaigns, as it is supposed to reach customers who are motivated to give your products or services a try. Businesses are advised to hire a direct mail marketing company to assist them in creating the ideal direct mail strategy. For instance, a new pediatrician in town can use direct mail to deliver postcards to local families with children.

The mailing list will depend on your type of campaign. If it is related to back-to-school checkups, the list should consist of families with kids under 12. In case the practice specializes in baby care, the list should contain pregnant women who’d need pediatric services after giving birth to their babies. Hence, the most important first step is learning about your audience. Determining your target audience is done by analyzing your competition, conducting surveys, creating a customer persona, etc.

Create a direct mail design

After determining your target audience, the following step is creating a direct mail design, which can be a flyer, postcard, or brochure. In order for the design to be effective, it’s supposed to bring attention to your products, services, and business in general. Therefore, the design has to be unique to capture the attention of the recipient by triggering a feeling of excitement instead of boredom.

Nevertheless, if your design is relatively boring and similar to those of other businesses, you will fail to attract the attention of recipients. The promotional material you send to the people on your mailing list should be easy to read, featuring bulletpoint lists, short paragraphs, and high-quality images.

The use of attractive images brings attention to the material because of the vividness of the colors. Hence, images should be chosen wisely by paying special attention to their resolution and vividness. It is paramount to select the best colors and pictures that trigger an emotional response. Read here about the types of image resolution.

The font should also be selected wisely. During the selection process, designers should stick to either one or two typefaces. Fonts are supposed to be of different sizes in order to attract the eye of readers. Also, the empty space, or white space, carefully. This refers to the space between design elements, such as images, text, and graphics. The aim of using white space in direct mail design is to keep the materials from becoming overcrowded.

Ultimately, every design must have a call to action, instructing prospects what to do after reading the material. It can be a phone number, QR code, or coupon, which eliminates the guesswork. Unless individuals are prompted to take action, your promotional material won’t be effective.

Add some value to the campaign

Another useful tip to follow in the creation of direct mail campaigns is to add some value to the promotions. Businesses should include incentives like bonuses, promotions, sales, and rebates. These incentives must provide recipients with a purpose to purchase products and services to make their offers unique.

Irrespective of the type of mail piece, a promotion, or a coupon, businesses should include a code for measuring their campaigns. The number of codes will inform you whether the campaign was successful, or some tweaks need to be made to it next time. If possible, make your offers time-limited to maximize the ROI. Follow this URL, https://www.thebalancesmb.com/roi-return-on-investment-1794432, to gain a better understanding of ROI and discover how to calculate it.

Personalize the mailers

Customers tend to appreciate personalization, which is why you should personalize your mailers. There are various opportunities for personalizing a mailer, like addressing it to the name of the recipient or using a handwritten envelope. The budget of businesses is of great significance in the choice of personalizing mailers.

Nevertheless, we recommend businesses invest a portion of their budgets for the personalization of their mailers. Potential customers would appreciate receiving personal promotional material, which is likely to keep out of the junk pile.

Target the audience more than once

Businesses should understand that they need to target their audience more than once to reach a lead conversion. Sending promotional materials only once does not usually result in the desired outcome. Therefore, companies should be persistent in targeting the same prospects either by sending the same materials or changing the design. It takes more than a single attempt for your sales to experience a boost.

Measure the performance

An important aspect of every campaign is to measure its performance. A tracking mechanism is necessary for the performance to get correct measurements. These mechanisms include landing pages, coupon codes, call tracking, etc. Unless you gain insight into the performance of the campaign, you will not be able to optimize it. The results will inform you about the aspects worth optimizing.