Direct mail has been a tried and true marketing strategy for decades, but the rise of web-based advertising has made it more important than ever to keep on top of the game. If direct mail is a part of your company’s advertising playbook, then you’ll want to make sure you’re using the most up-to-date techniques to get the best return on your investment.
Regardless of your budget or industry, direct mail can help you reach new customers, boost your sales, launch a new product, or simply increase brand recognition for your company. It’s effective as a standalone campaign, or can be combined with other advertising strategies.
Let’s take a look at typical rates of return on direct mail campaigns and some ways that you can get a better response rate to your mailings.
Normal Rates of Return on Direct Mail Campaigns
Direct mail can be used for many different purposes, so your rate of return will depend on what kind of response you’re looking for. According to JWM Business Services, a .5 to 2% return rate is about average for a direct mail marketing campaign. That means that you can expect around 1 or 2 purchases or responses per 100 mailers with a standard campaign.
While you might assume that modern advertising tools like e-mail offer a better response rate, in fact, the opposite is true: the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that email only had a 1% response rate. They estimate that direct mail has a response rate of up to 9%, partly because consumers’ physical mailboxes are still less cluttered than their inboxes!
Of course, measuring your success rate depends on what objective you’re trying to achieve. Are you advertising a new local business? Getting people to sign up for a website? Promoting a sale or a new product?
If your objective is simply to increase brand awareness, then you may be less concerned about reaching your sales targets with your first mailing. Some of the most effective campaigns help you build up a relationship with your customers over time.
Of course, none of that matters unless you have high quality direct mail campaigns with which to develop that relationship. Let’s take a look at some ways you can improve the quality of the responses you get from your mailers.
How to Improve Your Direct Mail Response Rates
Whether your direct mail campaigns have had mixed results, or you’ve already seen a positive response, there’s always room for improvement. Here are a few tips on how you can use the latest tools and strategies to make the most of your direct mail marketing campaign:
- Track Every Step of Your Campaign
If you’ve ever clicked on a link in an email campaign and seen a long list of numbers and letters show up in the URL, then you’ve likely clicked a trackable link. These links uniquely identify the email campaign that it came from, providing the marketing team with valuable analytics.
But you don’t need to use email marketing to make use of these tools. Coupon codes, trackable URLs, QR codes, and trackable phone numbers make it easy for you to measure the results of your direct mail campaign. A trackable URL or phone number allows you to see which pieces of mail generated the most clicks or calls. You can even use a personalized URL that directs each customer to a unique landing page that greets them by name.
Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by data. But at the very least, you can use this information to decide which customers to target in your next mailing and which to remove from your list.
- Target Your Mailings Right out of the Gate
This brings us to our next tip: targeted mailings. If you’ve done your job right, you know what areas are most relevant for your market, and are already planning to start a direct mail campaign there. From there, all you have to do is pare down the breadth of your campaign to fit into your budget.
Be sure to remove irrelevant addresses from that area that don’t have customers you need to target - PO boxes, drop addresses, seasonal dwellings, businesses, and so on.
Generally, you don’t have to worry about paring down chronic non-responders until at least three mailings, and even then it’s best to look at the entire carrier route rather than targeting specific individuals.
Conversely, you may not need to keep mailing someone who’s already an active customer - chances are, they’re already actively engaged with your sales team, so it makes sense to remove active prospects and customers from mailings. That can help clean up your lists and spend more time finding new customers who haven’t already committed to you.
- Know Your Audience
It isn’t true that millennials don’t respond to direct mail advertisements. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service itself calls this a myth! However, it’s important to understand the different approaches that various age groups and demographics take to their mail.
For example, a third of millennials currently subscribe to subscription box services, more than any other age group. But they’re also more likely to move, meaning that your targeted mailers could end up in the wrong mailbox when they pack up and leave for a new city.
You can address this, of course, by running your mailing list through the National Change of Address (NCOA) dataset, so your mailers can go where they need to.
Take these factors into account when deciding how to target your mailers. Addressing your mail to your customer “or current resident” can ensure that your campaign is still relevant to whoever lives there now. Likewise, include a URL or a QR code that can be scanned by a smartphone if you’re targeting a younger demographic since they’re less likely to call a phone number.
- Choose The Right Design
Direct mail advertisements come in many forms: enclosed mail, postcards, catalogs, and more. Remember when AOL sent CD-ROMs to almost everyone in America? Some businesses send out USB flash drives in their direct mail campaigns, although security-conscious individuals may be unlikely to plug them in, out of fear of ransomware.
Of course, the pricier the item, the more your campaign will cost overall, but depending on your product, the investment may be worth it. A branded calendar that you send your customers can provide 365 days worth of free advertising if it’s pretty enough for them to hang on their wall.
Don’t forget to customize the outside of your mailers too. Even if the offer itself is personalized or confidential, a flashy envelope can increase your brand recognition when friends, neighbors, and passersby see it sitting on a table or in the mailbox. That’s partly how Netflix became so ubiquitous — those bright red envelopes are hard to miss!
Improving Response Quality
Even if you have high response rates, it doesn’t mean much if the quality of those responses is subpar. How many conversions are you getting for those responses? How many of those conversions ultimately lead to sales? How many sales become regular customers?
The first, best thing you can do to improve response quality is to improve the quality of the mailing list itself. Make sure you’re getting leads from reputable sources, ones that accurately specify your target audience (geography, demographics, appropriate hobbies and traits relevant to your niche).
While saturation mailing is a solid way to reach a large number of people for generalized services, you might not get the quality of responses you’re looking for. Targeted mailing, on the other hand, lets you be more specific with your campaigns, rolling out mailings based on different audience segments.
Because you’re focusing on the kinds of customers who are more likely to be interested in your product or service, the quality of their responses will be greatly improved.
Apart from picking the right people, the actual mailings themselves need to be vibrant, dynamic and eye-catching. Your audience needs to be able to know a) who you are, b) what you can do for them, and c) how best to contact them.
The best campaigns have multiple touch points and channels for response; keep track of which touch points resonate with your prospective customers, and focus future mailings on what works. This should result in not just higher response rates, but stickier and more profitable responses overall.
Get Help From Mail Shark
Regardless of how far along you are in your campaign, the team at Mail Shark is here to help you customize it and work out all the details. We offer a range of direct mail products for most major industries, and we know how to target and track every piece of your campaign. We can help you launch a saturation campaign or aim your mailers at a specific demographic.
Whether you’re still in the design phase, or you have experience with direct mail and want to increase your ROI, Mail Shark has got you covered. Just reach out to us for a free print sample, or fill out our form to get a personalized quote for your campaign.