Best Practices Marketers Can Still Learn from Direct Mail

Think direct mail is obsolete? Think again. Discover why Kelsey Galarza, Director of Strategic Marketing for Kareo (an OpenView portfolio company), believes dusting off direct mail can make you a better marketer.

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The famously misquoted Mark Twain statement could just as well refer to direct mail in the 21^st century. Because there are so many ways to reach prospects, many marketers have come to think of snail mail as the dinosaur of yesteryear — mired in slow, tired processes.

The truth is there are many applications for direct mail in the present day. A number of industries — including local, education, agriculture, and real estate — still have large mail practices. True, in B2B technology there isn’t as much going around, but there are a number of reasons why mail should still be part of your strategy.

• Get past the gatekeeper: There are plenty of ways to do this, including dimensional mail and plain, hand-addressed #10s or card-sized packaging. One sneaky option is personalized #10s addressed to the target within an express mail package to the gatekeeper, with a note to please hand deliver.
• Engagement: If you can make the mail “do” something, you can get people to engage with it. You’ve probably pulled the sticker off the Sports Illustrated mail to order your NFL team sports bag, for example.
• Staying power: Including a content item that can be used as reference material in the office can get your brand in front of the prospect for the duration. Forget about calendars and silly desk items, think about something important and useful — schema posters for IT people, estimator tools for engineers, etc.

But the most important reason to try direct mail has nothing to do with the results of the campaign.  Sending big direct mail campaigns makes you a better direct marketer, period.

Too many of today’s “marketers” have effectively become button mashers — using a marketing automation system to blast out irrelevant, impersonal wastes of communication that erode your results.

Direct Mail Best Practices to Apply to Any Campaign

What does this have to do with mail? When you’re sending a million postcards, or letters, or self-mailers, you have to be confident in your program, or you might get fired because it just cost $650,000. In other words, when you do direct mail you learn how to make sure you’re doing marketing right.

Let’s see how you can take best practices from big mail and apply it to any campaign.

List

According to the old adage, WHO you’re going to send an offer to in responsible for about 70% of the effect. No matter what vehicle you’re using, before you send ask yourself: are you delivering your message to the right target? Don’t send an offer and creative that describes the economic implications of a newly architected data center to the help desk guy. He doesn’t care. If you have to look through your list manually, do it. Your campaign will get better results.

Have you excluded everyone who can’t take advantage of your offer? If you’re a SaaS company and you only accept US-based credit cards, exclude the folks from the Canary Islands! You’re just wasting your clicks. So yes, your list might be a little smaller, but your results will start to improve.

Offer

According to historical programs, 20% of your campaign results are attributed to the offer, itself. Is your offer compelling to the audience you really want to target? Is it written in a way that screams DO SOMETHING NOW!? Remember, that’s the purpose of all lead generation campaigns, regardless of vehicle.

“Take this survey today” is not very compelling. Try combining something the recipient wants with some urgency.  “Tell us what features you want before it’s too late” could even work. There are great resources to learn more about this, such as marketingexperiments.com.

Creative

This is the smallest driver, but shouldn’t be overlooked. Images that reflect the specific target segment (e.g.; city, gender, role) can improve your overall results. But don’t spend five weeks copywriting or selecting the background color of your retargeting ads. Your time is better spent on the bigger bang items.

3 Bonus Tips

1) Always Test Your Response Methods

On EVERY version. In mail, if you printed 100,000 pieces with the wrong phone number, you never, ever do it again. Check your links in every email or online version. Does it go all the way to your CRM correctly with the right campaign codes? Does the right white paper get emailed in the auto-response?

2) Always Test Your Data Before You Send

In mail you’d have the data “dumps” — a big file that you could check your personalization against. The same has to be true for any other campaign. Did your email list vendor give you the right list? Check it! Google the people if you have to make sure that most appear to fit your target market. See how it looks with really long names, hyphenated names, and in instances where you don’t have a name.

3) Always Do the Press Check

It only takes a second to test a campaign, so do it every time.

These lessons learned from the biggest programs to avoid with direct mail can actually help you improve your CTR’s and conversion rates for any campaign, and with practice you’ll see your overall results improve.

Photo by: Menno van der Horst