Direct Mail Marketing – Increase Efficiency & Sales

Direct mail marketing executed in a professional manner can make wonder for your business in terms of awareness, sales, brand building and customer interest. Here are 8 important factors for a successful direct mail marketing campaign.

Marketing Alternatives:

1. Marketing in Local or national radio stations
2. Advertisement in local or national newspaper
3. Commercials on local or national TV
4. Advertisement on billboards and posters
5. Direct Mail marketing via local flyers, postcards, brochures etc
6. Direct sales marketing through telemarketing
7. Business to Consumer communication via SMS & mobile communication

Direct Mail Marketing - Primary Advantages for your business growth

1. Target Advertising - most important benefit is the targeting a specific group of customers.
2. Personalization of Marketing Message - tailored to your customers specific needs based on previous transactions and gathered dat
3. Optimization of Marketing Message - Because of its direct accountability, direct mail marketing can be tested to find the best address list or customer target group; the best product offer; the best timing for your sales or marketing campaign (and many other factors). Then the winning tests can be rolled out to a wider audience for optimal results.
4. Specific data collection on customers - Responses (and non-responses) can be added to the database, allowing future mailings to be better targete

Successful Direct Mailing Campaign in 8 steps:

Define primary purpose of your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

1. Information regarding launch of your newly established company
2. Increase sales and customer contacts
3. Decrease customer churn
4. Increase profitability from existing consumers
5. Counter on competitor activities and product offerings
6. Advertise your company's new products / services
7. Advertise a promotion and limited sales campaign
8. Brand building for your existing product line or company
9. Others marketing purposes not covered in this article

Marketing decisions based on customer knowledge

1. Message - What and when do you want to communicate and to whom?
2. Total cost for the campaign; e.marketing material, advertisement costs, purchase of address information, distribution costs, and follow up costs such as telemarketin
3. Sales targets - What is the total number of shipments, the number of responses, and the average order value per response?
4. Effect on churn levels on existing customer base - before the direct mail marketing campaign and after the direct mail marketing activity.
5. Hit rate, i.number of customers that you expect to respond
6. Break even for this campaign, i.what sales revenues are required in order for your direct mail marketing campaign to become positiv

Consider the following factors before testing

Most important aspects of effective direct mail marketing is which customers to contact. Logical starting point for understanding how to construct your customer target group is to analyze your current customers. When you understand existing customer base you can effectively expand your customer target group by identifying similar companies that are not your customers today.

1. What revenues do different customer groups generate to your business?
2. Which of your products shall the customers purchase?
3. What industry segments are your customers active in?
4. Geographical distance from the customer to your stores?
5. Your potential customers turnover and sizes?
6. When should you activate your campaign? When is this customer group most likely to accept a sales proposal?

Test your direct mail marketing assumptions - GO LIVE

1. Order or collect approximately 500-600 customer addresses
2. Divide these customers into 2-3 customer target groups
3. Test different marketing messages or product / service offerings on each group of customers
4. Observe customer response, hit rate, number of sales and effect on revenue

Analyse the Direct Mail Marketing Test, draw your conclusion and Decide

1. Did you reach your primary purpose defined under section?
2. If your objectives where not reached find our why?
3. What communication channel was most effective?
4. What print material (flyer, brochure, postcard etc) and was most effective?
5. What sales channel was most effective?
6. When and how did the customer contact you?
7. Decide on final direct mail marketing message and product offering
8. Decide on the timing for the direct mail marketing campaign.

Take care of contacting customers

1. As a general rule, more response alternatives your give your customer (Internet, mail, coupons, fax, telephone, SMS, in-person visits) increase the campaign's hit rat
2. Assign responsible contact people on your company for managing the customer responses.
3. Consider server capacity for peak in incoming traffic generated by contacting customers?
4. Secure mail server access on your company to the people involved in handling the customers response
5. Secure proper storage of the incoming customer mails?
6. If the direct mail marketing campaign involves coupons, take decisions on the in-house vs. external outsourcing? Remember to store the customer coupons are stored for sales and tax purposes.
7. Make sure your company's telephone can handle simultaneous calls, a "call back" solution perhaps?
8. Customer contacts vary over the week and during the day. Peak for customer contacts are often in the beginning of the week and around lunch hours, but draw your own conclusions and be prepaire

Decisions for the full Direct Mail Marketing Campaign!

1. What message should be communicated to your target group?
2. What product offerings or services should be in focus?
3. What customer segment/-s?
4. What response channel/-s should be presented to the target group?
5. Where can you purchase or get free access to the customers' addresses?
6. Make your product offering or service stand out from your competitor!
7. Size format of the print material
8. Text format of the add or sales message
9. Distribution format of the print material
10. Timing of the shipment (preferably Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday)

Implementing Your Direct Mail Marketing Campaign

1. Depending on the distribution volume of your campaign, try to negotiate with your local distribution companies in order to achieve a better pricing structur
2. Season variations or vacations: Are your customers in any way affected by the season, and will this affect your Direct Mailing? Are your customers at home or on some holidays?
3. Last minute changes: Have there been any large changes in the circumstances since you tested your hypotheses? For example, changes in competitors prices, marketing campaign from your competitors, bad publicity and so on? Will this require you to change anything in your campaign?

Follow up and draw learning's from your direct mail marketing campaign!

1. Which customers did actually respond?
2. What did the customer purchase?
3. When did the consumer of your product or services make the purchase?
4. Average Order Value compared to estimations
5. What did they not buy?
6. Industry segmentation based on customer response and channel
7. How did customers respond? Via what response channel?

Why did some customers not respond?

1. Contact a small group of customers.
2. Industry segmentation - can you identify any trends?
3. What would the customers like you to offer them in order to close the sale pitch?

GOOD LUCK WITH GROWING YOUR BUSINESS AND REVENUES!