Direct Mail Mistakes: Top Five Campaign Crushers

Direct mail, especially direct mail used with personal URLs (PURLs), can be one of the most effective and traceable parts of your marketing campaign. Direct mail is effective and traceable only if certain precautions are taken. Here are the top five marketing errors made in direct mail campaigns. Marketing executives, take note, because making one of these marketing mistakes on your direct mail can turn a potentially strong campaign into a guaranteed flop.

Haste Makes Waste if you Overlook the Database
Unlike online advertising, email marketing, television and magazine ads, you have complete control over who sees your direct mail piece. Yet many marketing executives consistently use the wrong mailing list and send their direct mail piece to a cold audience. Whether it is an email or postal mailing list; in-house or rented; the mailing list is your campaign’s lifeline.

If you take the time to create a precise and targeted mailing list at the start of your direct mail campaign, the results can be record-breaking for your company. In his new book, The Inside Advantage, by advertising legend Robert H. Bloom, he says each product/service has a specific type of customer that will make purchases in an optimal quantity providing for the best possible growth for the company. As a marketing executive you need to identify this market and get your direct mail piece in front of them with the right mailing list.

Variable Thinking, a full-service marketing firm, specializes in identifying the exact type of customer for your product or service. This can be done using your existing database, or identifying new sources. By using an existing customer database, you’re advertising to people who have purchased your products or services in the past.

To Make the Grade You Must Pass the Test
Tied in with your mailing list is possible mistake number two. If you skip out on testing your direct mail with your market/mailing list you threaten the cost effectiveness of the entire direct mail campaign.

To effectively test your direct mail piece, send out a small percentage of your advertising to your market segment to see response. If it’s strong, you can estimate a ROI, rate of investment, for your campaign. If response is weak, you may want to rethink your mailing list.

Calling all Customers! Read all About it.
Mistake number three and four focus on the actual content and layout of your direct mail piece. The two key elements of any advertising document are the headline and the call to action. The headline is your hook that catches the reader’s eye, keeps them focused. The call-to-action is how you get them to DO something. Personalized direct mail is a proven marketing method for getting the consumers attention and getting them to act.

For example, if your direct mail piece focuses on a really great graphic and puts the headline/offer in an obscure place, the reader may look at the graphic, think its great, but NOT see the point of it, due to a lack of an attention-grabbing headline, and toss the direct mail piece. You need balance. Keep the headline as the “center piece” of the ad using graphics or copy to punctuate its purpose.

In the same vein, if the direct mail piece doesn’t call your reader to ACT, call in, email, buy your product, you not only miss out on the strong traceability of direct mail, i.e. you can tell who “got the message” by who acts on it, you’ve also had no purpose for sending it in the first place. Personal URLs (PURLs) added to direct mail pieces allow customers to response online, request more information or make a purchase, while sending real-time leads and reports to the advertiser.

Follow-Up and Follow Thru
Finally, to guarantee that your direct mail campaign will succeed, follow up with your potential clients. Follow up can include:

A. Filling order requests quickly.
B. Sending additional mail to bounced emails or non-response clients.
C. Researching the reasons for bounced emails or returned postal mail.
D. Gauging ROI for this direct mail campaign and deciding how to increase it with the next campaign.

Direct mail marketing can be your company’s easiest advertising decision, don’t kill its potential by making these mistakes.

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