5 Surefire Ways to Fail at Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

5 Surefire Ways to Fail at Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign:from Business 2 Community by Christopher Jan Benitez
Running a direct mail marketing campaign takes a lot of time and effort on your part. Not only do you have creative control on how the mail is designed and sent out to a list, but you also have to worry about tracking the results of your campaign and figuring out what needs to be fine-tuned before you run another campaign. Therefore, you need to plan accordingly and check the performance of your campaign regularly to ensure the success of going direct mail.
However, if your intention is to fail with your direct mail marketing, then you might as well fail miserably by following some of the terrible advice below.

Sending mail to an unclean list

A mailing list can be built organically through sign-ups or by taking information from existing customer data. You can also purchase from vendors to instantly send out your mail. Regarding the latter, there are cases that the list you bought provides inaccurate data about your target audience. By not “cleaning” your list with the NCOA (National Change of Address) to ensure that people still live in their respective addresses as indicated, you run the risk of wasting your mail.

Writing dull copy

The words in your mail push readers down to the conversion funnel. They need to buy into the idea you’re promoting in your marketing message to effectively turn them into consumers or brand advocate. By not being sensitive to the tone, choice of words, and format of your copy, you will only veer them away from your business.

Featuring an unclear or inappropriate call to action

Direct mail is inherently aggressive, which is why you need to come at your most persuasive and compelling to force your readers into taking your action of choice. While most companies essentially indicate their contact details as their call to action, haphazardly putting the wrong contact details – telephone, website, fax, e-mail/physical address – can be counterproductive in certain cases. For instance, an online-based company indicating their physical address and telephone number on their direct mail would fare worse than using their website URL and e-mail instead.

Sending out mail made from poor materials

The quality of the paper stock and color contributes to the impression they make of your mail. On one hand, the sturdier and lush your mail is, the more impact it would make on the recipients. On the other, direct mail made with flimsy stock and stale color is sure to be thrown into the trash.

Forgetting to include tracking tools

One of the advantages that direct mail marketing holds over its counterparts is the ability to check the performance of your campaign. This can be done by using coupon codes, URL trackers, 1-800 numbers, and others embedded on the mail. People should touch these points to see whether the mail is compelling them to its call to action or not. Therefore, not being able to include these on your mail will ultimately leave you without the necessary data to properly consider direct mail.
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