Direct mail

Direct mail is one of the easiest ways to target customers. It is also one of the best ways to measure and test the ability to sell new subscriptions. You can try a multitude of formats, creative approaches, copy offers and various combinations of these and you can test these with different carefully selected target audience segments. For these reasons, direct mail will be one of the most important channels in the restricted telemarketing era.

Newspapers have not fully exploited direct mail because it carries a relatively high cost per order. But when you measure it using an annualized cost for a unit of circulation, it stacks up much more favorably because of its very high retention rate. Because direct mail is passive, meaning no one is twisting the arm of the prospect, the retention rates tend to parallel those of voluntary orders.

Formats for direct mail can range from postcards to brochures to multi-media CD-ROM’s. Most direct-mail professionals agree, though, that it is hard to beat a direct-mail package that includes a letter. So whatever else is included in your direct mailing, a cover letter should be used with it. Often a letter by itself is sufficient, or it can be accompanied with a brochure or other inserts. But the letter is the most important element because it carries the impact of quasi-personal communication.

How long should your appeal be? There are two schools of thought on this. Some say that in today’s world you have to capture people’s attention quickly and get to the point. Others say, “The more you tell, the more you sell.” Like so many questions in direct mail, you don’t need to be satisfied by theoretical answers. You can test long-copy versions of your appeal against short-copy versions and see what works best for you. There is no reason to guess when you can test. If you are afraid of belaboring people with long copy, that probably means that the copy is not compellingly written.

If the copy is all targeted and relevant to the audience, they may read all of it or enough of it to be persuaded to take action. More important than the length of the copy or in fact any of the creative aspects of the direct-mail package, is the list that you send to in the first place. Here is where direct mail really shines. Because of the ability to purchase lists inexpensively for virtually any audience segment that you can imagine, you can make very specific targeted appeals. For example, if your newspaper has comprehensive golf coverage and you send a direct-mail package to golf enthusiasts, you can be confident they will read a lengthy well-written appeal because it is so relevant to their hobby. You can purchase lists of virtually any audience segment from major lists brokers. You can segment people based on musical preferences, their investment habits, their political affiliations and contributions, and criteria such as pet ownership, sweepstakes participation, symphony attendants, bible readership and many other factors. So if your newspaper has a good faith section, you could do a small-scale mailing to bible enthusiasts with a very targeted appeal. This would probably be something they have not seen from your newspaper before. You could send a separate appeal to the golf enthusiasts, and so on.

So the power of direct mail lies in its ability to give people something that is highly relevant to them. It is also scaleable, meaning you can direct mailings in quantities as small as 200-300 or as large as 30,000 or more pieces.

The elements of a direct mail’s success consist of three things:

·        The graphics and written content

·        The list

·        The offer

Of these, the creative approach is the least attribute of success. The most important attributes are the list and the offer. We’ve talked about the power of telemarketing to select lists that are highly relevant. The other attribute you test is the offer. Is it better to offer 50 percent off or half off? Test these and see which works better. You can offer 50 percent off or $7 off of a $14 order. You can offer varying subscription terms and payment options. The things that the best offers have in common is that they are relevant and easy to understand and easy for the customer to administer. For some customers, access to the family checkbook is a barrier. For them, a phone call credit card option would be much more convenient. So devote much of your time in creating the direct-mail piece to the offer itself. If you are using a premium item, be sure to test it on a small group before rolling it out to a large audience. Premium items are notoriously difficult to predict. Some that seem like sure winners will flop, while others will provide surprising success.

Direct mail takes virtually all of the guesswork out of marketing, because you can so easily test your ideas on small groups of people. It’s been said that in marketing there are no substitutes for test results. Past performance is no substitute for current test data. Unlike even scientific polling, tests are based on current real-world data, not theoretical statistical sampling models.

Even if you are using materials across all of your sales channels, you may want to use direct mail to test the variables such as the offers and creative approaches, because you can track the results with such precision. You may want to take your best direct-mail piece and use that as the basis of your in-paper ads, your free-standing inserts and even as the basis of your telemarketing scripts. Unlike any other medium, direct mail will tell you what works and what doesn’t.