How to Get More Bang for Your Buck with Direct Mail Marketing

As a small business, it can often be difficult to know whether you are making the right decision when planning your marketing strategy. There really is no limit to the number of marketing tools, approaches and techniques that we have at our disposal and often due to budget or time constraints, we need to make fast effective decisions about where to take marketing campaigns.

It is sometimes said that direct mail marketing has long passed its peak. However, the opposite is true. Like every other sales tactic, the success of direct mail campaigns depends on the planning that is put into them, even before the first piece of mail is delivered. Direct mail marketing is still an excellent strategy for bringing in new customers as well as reviving past ones. This is especially true when direct mail is linked to online marketing. In fact, in a recent DMA Response Rate Study, 33% of people were found to respond to direct mail by going online.

All of this boils down to just one question; how do you effectively market your small business with direct mail marketing, and how can pairing this with online marketing increase your sales further?

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Develop a Successful Marketing Strategy

In order to develop a successful marketing strategy there are a number of points that you need to cover. These include:

• Deciding what it is you are hoping to accomplish with your marketing campaign: this can be something as simple as gaining new customers, inviting people to an event or building awareness of the specific product or service. Whatever your end goal, it is important that you are clear about it are sending your potential customers mixed messages may lead to a lack of understanding and interest.
• Being realistic and accurate about your budget: direct marketing campaigns may be ongoing or just run as a single campaign. The length of your campaign will depend on the budget that you need for it so ensure that this is taken into account during the planning process.
• Deciding how many times you will target the same audience: in order to be able to plan a marketing strategy effectively you will need to know how many times you are going to send mail to a specific group prospects, and over what timeframe. I would suggest that mailing them around four times over a year would be an acceptable initial strategy.

Include a 'Call to Action'

This is also known as a direct response campaign and will provide your customers with a request for a response. There is no use sending an engaging and interesting letter, flyer or brochure without a call to action as this may end up sabotaging your whole campaign. Something as simple as "call us on …" or "visit our website" will allow your potential customers to reach you.

It is important to remember that you are sending a piece of sales material as opposed to an informational leaflet. Don't worry about feeling as though you are being pushy by adding a call to action to your mail; if done correctly it can be an extremely effective way of helping your customers take the next step in purchasing your product or service.

Using Direct Mail Marketing and Online Marketing

iIt is possible to use direct mail successfully as an individual marketing tool, however it is even more effective when integrated with a range of other marketing techniques, such as email marketing. Sending a follow-up email a few days after your direct mail has been delivered will be a gentle reminder to your potential customers to get in touch.

Social media marketing is also an extremely effective follow-up to direct mail marketing. Posting a message on Twitter or Facebook alerting the recipient of pending mail will make them more likely to single it out when the post arrives.

So if you feel your businesses direct mail marketing strategy is not as effective as it could be, or if you are considering integrating this approach with online marketing then hopefully these tips have proved useful in helping you plan your next campaign in the hopes of securing a larger percentage of your demographic.
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