45 Quick and Painless Tips about Direct Mail Marketing

45 Quick and Painless Tips about Direct Mail Marketing:from Business 2 Community by Christopher Jan Benitez

Image taken from Flickr.

Running a thorough and effective direct mail marketing campaign can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. The last thing you’ll need are long-winding advice about direct mail to make an already difficult task much more difficult.Therefore, below are some of the best quips that you should apply in all your upcoming mail campaigns.

Mailing list

• Capture their name and home address.
• Grab their e-mail address and telephone number to give you more ways of contacting them.
• Display your form at points of purchase or your store’s entrance.
• Show your form on their website’s sidebar or footer to make it appear sitewide.
• Include previous customer records on your list.
• If you have the cash to shell out, buy a list from a trusted vendor.
• Indicate the demographic of your market to make the list as highly targeted as possible.
• Run your list using the NCOALink® to weed out unwanted/invalid addresses in your database.

Branding

• Ensure that the branding on your direct mail is consistent with your corporate identity.
• Maintain your unique selling point (USP) prevalent on your mail.
• Emphasize your strengths.
• Hide your weaknesses.
• Take advantage of opportunities against competitors.
• Eliminate threats.
• Think of your logo as a visual identity that best represents your company.
• If you feel your logo doesn’t help in your branding, change it.

Mail copy

• Make promises that can you deliver in the end.
• Be clear and concise as possible.
• Use active voice.
• Use conversational tone.
• Be as personal as possible.
• Believe in what you’re writing.
• Take time to think of the best words.
• Keep editing your direct mail copy until it is perfect.
• Include a compelling call to action.
• Use big fonts and contrasting colors on important information.
• Include coupon code or freebies to enforce call to action.
• Provide incentives to early purchasers from your campaign.
• Do A/B testing to see which copy converts more people into customers.

Printing and sending mail

• Do comparative analysis to different printing and mailing companies.
• Choose a company that can do both for you.
• While you’re at it, look for a company that sells mailing lists.
• Ask for free print samples.
• Use postcards if you are requesting reply mail from your recipients.
• Use print brochure to send out detailed information about your business.
• Use booklets or catalog to show complete inventory of products you’re selling.
• Design over a print template from the company to eliminate technical errors.
• Look for service providers that can do the design for you.
• Be updated on the latest USPS pricing.
• Presort your list according to zip code to save money.

Tracking mail

• Track each recipient with a unique code to isolate the activities of each.
• Use 1-800 numbers to lead the recipients down the marketing funnel
• Use free URL shorteners to count the number of times they passed by your website.
• Print out QR codes on your mail for cross-interaction with mobile devices.
• Record your campaign’s progress manually using a spreadsheet.

To help you succeed with your direct mail campaign, read “Direct Mail Marketing Basics” from PrintRunner. The 34-page e-book will run through the basics of forming an idea for your direct mail down to interpreting the results of your campaign. Click here to get your FREE copy now.