The most common direct-mail mistakes

Mistake #1: Not focusing on the list.

Do you know what the most important part of your direct-mail campaign is? It’s not the copy. It’s not the artwork. It’s not even the format. It’s the mailing list. A great direct-mail package with wonderful copy and fantastic design might pull double the response of a poorly conceived mailing. But the best list can pull a response 10 times more than the worst list for the identical mailing piece. When you are procuring lists, be sure that they are scrubbed for accuracy to reduce duplication. Often for most newspapers, they can build fantastic lists from their own customer subscription databases. Your subscription database can be used, for example, to target your Sunday-only subscribers with a weekday offering. This list will be much more accurate than any you can purchase and the offer can be highly relevant, since you already know something about these people in so far as they are a Sunday-only customer.

Mistake #2: Not taking advantage of direct mail’s ability to test, test and retest.

As a result, newspapers base their decision on what they think will work or what their boss thinks will work and they continue to repeat under-performing direct-mail campaigns. In direct mail, there is no need to assume that you know what will work because you can always test to find out.

Mistake #3: Not including a letter in with your package.

Postcards, brochures and other formats are not as effective as a format that includes a letter, which will almost always outpull self mailers, postcards or brochures without a letter. The letter creates the idea of personal communication. Readers view letters as real mail from a real person as opposed to commercial advertising. Many direct-mail professionals have started with a letter and later converted it to a more commercialized format. They found that their plain letter outpulled the more commercialized piece. This should be good news for smaller newspapers with small budgets that don’t have a large graphics staff on hand to produce whiz-bang marketing pieces. What you say in your letter and who you send it to is more important. And there is no graphics substitute for a plain letter from a real person written on newspaper company stationary.

Mistake #4: Not having an offer.

An offer is what gets the reader to respond to your mailing. It’s amazing how many direct-mail pieces promote the benefits and features and the offer is buried as almost an afterthought. To be successful, the entire direct-mail package should sell the offer, not the product itself. Much of  your letter should be devoted to emphasizing the virtues of your specific offer at this point in time. Make sure you have a well thought out offer in every mailing. If you are offering three weeks free or 50 percent off or counting the virtues of EZ Pay, integrate the offer in your headline and throughout your body copy. This is especially important when selling a mature product like newspapers. Virtually every person on your mailing list has had experience with a newspaper. While your newspaper is certainly unique, they generally get the basic idea. What they will be more interested in at this point in time is some reason to subscribe that is more powerful than any they have seen previously. That should help you focus on your offer. The offer should not be buried in your copy but it should be emphasized throughout and in any inserts that are included in the direct-mail package.

Mistake #5: Poor follow up.

Used by itself, even successful direct-mail campaigns may draw response rates of perhaps 1 or 2 percent. It is a mistake to think of direct mail in isolation. Any direct-mail campaign should be timed to coincide with other sales-channel activity. The same direct-mail piece can be used as an in-paper ad and as a single-copy insert. The offer that is used in your direct-mail should be or could be the same offer made by your outbound telemarketing people. The same graphics and offer could be posted on your Web site at that period of time. Direct-mail can be coordinated with door to door sales crew efforts so that crews arrive in a neighborhood one or two weeks after the mailing has hit. This way the mailing warms up the approach for the door-to-door sales crew. Follow up is a crucial component of direct-mail success. A direct-mail campaign should be looked at as a branding initiative as much as it is a direct-response mechanism. To succeed as a branding initiative, somebody has to follow up and close the sale either by phone or in person.

Mistake #6: Many copy writers of direct mail forget to use the magic words like  "guaranteed" and "money back."

To help overcome reader’s objections, it is best to reassure them that if they are not happy with their service or with the newspaper itself, they can quit at any time with no further obligations, or better yet, with their money back. If you are offering a discount, you might consider expressing it in the form of an extended period of subscription. For example, rather than saying 25 percent off of a 12-month subscription, you might position it as a three-months bonus term when you subscribe for a year. Other terms will help create urgency in your direct-mail piece. Each direct-mail piece should have some limitation in terms of when people must respond. Each time you create a direct-mail piece, ask yourself, “How can I cause people to take action now rather than later?” A discount that expires at the end of the month is a good way.

Mistake #7: Many newspaper direct-mail campaigns feature pictures of the newspaper as the primary art device.

People don’t care about your newspaper, especially people who are not subscribing to it. What they care about are people like themselves. So the pictures should emphasize people somehow enjoying the newspaper or benefiting from it. Or simple lifestyle shots of people would be more productive than static shots of the cover of your sports section or your travel page. Make sure the graphics are relevant to people and not to your product, per say.

To summarize these mistakes, the most important aspect of direct-mail is the ability to procure a highly targeted list and send people a letter that offers a specific, relevant offer that has a expiration date associated with it to create urgency. Testing is paramount because it removes virtually all guesswork. You can test your campaigns first internally, then with a small batch of non-subscribers. You can learn from those non-subscribers, which offers, creative approaches and copy points are most effective. Over time you will build a stable of three or four direct-mail packages aimed at different groups that have proven to be most successful for you in your market. No theories, no feelings, no guesswork, just results. And nobody can argue with results.