Make this mistake with direct mail marketing and you’re finished…

Yes A Lot Of Direct Mail Marketing Gets Thrown Straight In The Trash

Direct mail is one of the most important pieces of your marketing plan. Developing and executing the campaign can many times be a costly mistake, because today’s mailing regulations can get complicated…

In fact, postage rates are changing as costs makes it harder to profit and if you’re not clear about your target market and how to stand out.

The right message is crucial and must get to target prospect in the right way on a frequent follow-up sequence.

Capturing your reader’s attention has to happen fast (in 9 seconds or less) and your reader must be engaged and motivated in order to take action…

Direct Mail Marketing

Let’s focus and talk about how to use direct mail marketing so its geared towards your full advantage.

Direct mail marketing is one of the most common and recognised forms of awareness or engagement with a brand.

This direct measurement of direct mail marketing is often achieved by using a specific lead generation ad.

In the digital space you’d leverage a specific landing page, which is specifically designed for the traffic source going to your website.

Tip: The landing page must be relevant in order to match message to target advertisement. 

Direct mail campaigns are generally organised geographically and sent to all postal customers in an area or to all customers on a list.

It is posted mail which advertises your business and its products and services. Direct mail marketing campaigns encourage engagement with good relationship building.

Get focused on improving customer response rates by precisely tailoring messages to target audiences, empowering prospective customers to read your advertising without being distracted by competing advertising.

Types Of Direct Mail Marketing

The most common types of direct mail marketing include:

• Catalogues – bound, multi-page promotions of products
• Self-mailers – created from a single-printed sheet that has been folded
• Envelope mailers – with inserts inside the envelope
• Postcards – with your promotional message on one side and the customer’s address on the other
• Snap mailers – folds and seals with pressure
• Dimensional mailers – for example, a small box
• Intelligent documents – printed with personalised information from a database.

Direct Mail Marketing Tips

A reliable, accurately defined mailing list and quality mail advertising improves the open rates of response to your direct mail marketing.

You can buy lists of addresses in the postcodes you want to send direct mail to or lists of customers who have opted-in to receive offers from third parties.

Australia Post’s Open Up to Mail initiative gives tips for buying a direct mail list. Find out about Australia Post’s direct mail services.

You don’t want to cut corners on research, your presentation and design are crucial because you want to get the highest conversions right?

Engage a designer and brief them on the end result you want so you can design your direct mail marketing material for greatest impact and for your particular target audience.

Keep your messages sharp, focused and brief with the help of a professional copywriter.

Limited offers with promotional incentives such as discounts can improve response rates, but make sure you have the budget to deliver on your discounted offers.

Always follow-up with a second direct mail marketing or telemarketing if your advertising spend allows, because you keep your customers’ attention on your products and services.

Know your responsibilities before undertaking any direct mail marketing because here in Australia you must understand legislation on collecting and holding personal information.

Direct mail marketing campaigns are often responsible for holding information records that are protected by privacy rights regulations.

The National Privacy Principles (NPP) on Australian Government’s privacy website explain how businesses should collect, use, secure and disclose information about individuals.

Taken into consideration the huge success direct mail marketing has and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your continued success.

Here are key steps to putting together a highly effective direct mail marketing program:

• List all benefits customers get from the purchase of your products and services
• Pick single most powerful benefit on list in alignment with customer’s problem
• Build an attention-getting headline around that one specific benefit
• Remember to use emotion to fulfill the desire (i.e, to be beautiful, young, wealthy, desired, popular, successful, etc)
• Develop a sales letter using  powerful headline to grab attention
• Provide information and motivate customers to take action
• Put together supplementary items (i.e brochure, order form, reply envelope or note to encourages them to read the letter)
• Rent or purchase quality mailing list which matches your product or service
• Test and compare cost of mailing vs. cost per order
• Measure results and calculate ROM (Return on Mailing) dollars
• Code your mailings to measure response
• Mail frequently to a smaller subset of your ideal list
• Continue to test and refine your direct mail marketing plan in context to highest customer lifetime value...

You can see how direct mail marketing can empower you to find local or even nation wide target market to send letters or postcards…and bring in new leads, clients and customers.

Use direct mail marketing to establish your brand, increase walk-in-traffic and deliver relevant targeted offers promoting products, services, grand openings or special events.

If you own or operate a retail business (brick-and-mortar store) and you’re planning a promotion, you want your offer to be time sensitive (Limited Time ONLY) for 3-7 days.

Tip: Use Limited Time Only Offer to create a need to take action with urgency…

You want to create a sense of urgency with value to a real purpose using reason why marketing bear in mind and consider the time frame to encourage people to buy now.

Buy now is always good for your cash flow and business, right?

Testing, tracking, measuring and fine-tuning your marketing campaign allows you to get savvy with much better sales results and therefore lowering overall cost of each campaign.

Telemarketing is best leveraged for higher priced, high margin products or services…

When you hear the word telemarketing, what four letter word do you think of?

Ok, now you’ve got that off your chest, here’s a clear and powerful way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!

To be successful in telemarketing you want to:

• Put together a plan, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the call within a specified time frame
• Develop a list of topics to discuss and the questions you want to present around these topics
• Input verbiage checking to see if you are calling at a good time
• Include enough questions to keep the conversation interesting, yet not too many to sound like you are interrogating
• Start with broad questions and narrow your focus as the conversation continues
• Offer feedback to show you’re paying attention, listening and engaging conversation
• Don’t insult their intelligence or manipulate
• Remember to listen first, talk second
• Stay relaxed and conversational…

Telemarketing doesn’t have to be the trauma it’s typically made out to be.

You can put together an honest, personal and effective telemarketing campaign that is endearing, informative and gets the job done.

Think of how you would want to be treated on a marketing call. Ask your friends and family what they hate most about the telemarketing calls they get and work hard to craft your plan in a better way.

When selling by telephone, you have approximately thirty seconds to convince the customer to listen to you.

You need an opening statement which captures their attention, conveys who you are, what you want and why the prospect should listen.

It’s easy to see how direct mail marketing and telemarketing can positively boost sales and impact your business profits by bringing in new customers.

It’s a constant process of defining and refining, matching offers to the right customer by increasing the level of awareness about your products, services and company branding.

Getting people to respond to direct mail marketing or advertising means using a strategy, so many companies include coupons in their postcard mailers and flyers to encourage prospective customers to come in, book an appointment or schedule a consultation.

Coupons are tried and tested, there are a few ways to make coupons even more effective more attractive and here are a few tips that can help:

Direct mail coupons must be perceived as being valuable, so what if customers don’t feel that your coupons actually serve any real benefit to them?

Firstly, they may not actually respond and as a result, you want to carefully craft your offer.

Remember you want to match your offer to the customer, which represents value, without going broke or putting your company into a serious financial disadvantage.

Direct mail coupons need to attract attention and stand out, as with any other direct mail offer, appearance actually matters here.

This goes back to working with a direct mail designer to get the best possible look for your coupons, and you’re more likely to see far greater results if every detail ties in with offer.

People are drawn into eye-catching offers and the better your direct mail coupons look at conveying your offer in context to matching your customers interest the better your overall response rates.

It’s crucial to always Include a timeline because if you don’t add a deadline to your offer, you may not see a great response.

Tip: Scarcity, timelines or limited offers can actually help your business in the long run

You may not want to offer a 50% discount six months from now, so including a deadline is a good idea in terms of your response rate and financial health of your business, does that make sense?

Direct mail coupons can be a significant way to encourage new customers and reactivate existing customers to return to your business.

Your direct mail marketing campaign makes sure customers get the offer and take action.

In summary, direct mail marketing and telemarketing, you must get totally clear on your business direction: 

• How to get business to next level and achieve goals
• Clarity and optimism leads to greater wealth faster
• Get clarity on ideal clients (age, demographics, etc)
• Get clarity on best pricing (higher and multiple price points)
• Get clarity on USP, best sales pitch (improve conversions)

Building your marketing machine:

• Schedule marketing times (develop marketing calender)
• Must test and measure all your marketing (multiple channels)
• Must engage, follow-up consistently, re-position and educate

Transform your creativity and productivity:

• Focus 25 mins on top priority tasks
• Take 5 minute breaks every 25 minutes to refresh
• Set a leaving time to knock off work (power of deadlines)
• Allocate and block time to plan and grow your business
• Market strategically, trial and error vs. system

Direct mail marketing can be expensive, bear in mind you want to be clear and fully understand your customer lifetime value.

Through a successful direct mail marketing campaign you can quickly and easily offset costs and skyrocket business profits (including able to crush and out spend competition by advertising consistently).

That’s why so many companies take advantage of direct mail marketing.

The bottom line is the key to success is in your structure and strategy, if you approach marketing with correct planning, you enjoy much better returns on investment (ROI).

Direct Mail Marketing