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General Articles >> Direct Mail Strategy >> 5 Best Practices
Direct Mail Advertising - 5 Best Practices
by Brandon Cornett
Advertising by direct mail offers certain advantages of traditional print advertising (such as magazines). For one thing, direct mail advertising grants you more flexibility and control over your audience targeting.
You can select the exact recipients of your direct mail message, whereas with a print ad all you can do is aim for a general demographic. And savvy advertisers knows that speaking to a specific, predefined audience is one of the keys to advertising success — be it with direct mail or otherwise.
Another benefit to using direct mail advertising is the “direct” nature of it. With a print advertisement, you are hoping that some or most of the magazine's readers view the page bearing your ad. But with direct mail, you can send your message directly to the intended recipients, which is the closest you can come to a guaranteed readership.
Proven Strategies of Direct Mail Advertising
But as with any other form of marketing, direct mail advertising has its own set of best practices you should follow — at least in the early stages of your direct mail campaign. After you have experimented, tested and tracked your direct mail results for a while, you'll be able to devise your own best practices. But to begin the process, it's usually best to adhere to certain proven strategies of direct mail advertising.
Here are five best practices that apply in most cases:
1. Hone Your List
A successful direct mail advertising campaign must always begin with the list. (Actually, going back a ways, it begins with a great product or service worth advertising in the first place. But we will assume that much.)
Your list should focus on a certain select audience that is identifiable in some common way. For instance, maybe they are all first-time homeowners ... or CEOs ... or stay-at-home spouses ... or senior accountants. The more tightly you can segment your list, the more you will be able to tailor your message (see next item).
Learn more about mailing lists
2. Tailor Your Message
A tightly focused mailing list allows you to tailor your message to that specific audience. This is critical in direct mail advertising, because you never want to send a direct mail piece to a general audience. With a segmented mailing list, you can speak directly to your audience in a way that is most likely to evoke their response. For example, with a general mailing list, you would never be able to say something like: “Attention seniors over the age of 55...”
Learn more about direct mail writing
3. Showcase the Primary Benefit
On a direct mail advertising piece, you will not have the space needed to showcase all of your product / service benefits and features. If you did that, your message would be diluted and ineffective for direct mail purposes. So single out the top benefit (for postcard length) or the top two benefits (for letter length) and develop those fully.
This is especially important in those areas that will get the first glance (outer envelope, headlines, photo captions, etc.).
Learn more about product benefits
4. Boost Your Offer
If you are not making some kind of offer with your direct mail piece, then there is really no reason to mail it out. Direct mail without a viable offer is destined for the trashcan all across the board. When modern consumers pull advertising mail from their mailboxes, they immediately scan it for anything of value. They expect an offer of some kind — 20% off, no registration fee, free gift with purchase, free shipping, etc.
Entire chapters of direct mail advertising books have been dedicated to the offer, so for now let it suffice to say that the strength of your offer will largely determine the size of your response.
Learn more about direct mail offers
5. Track and Test
The only to know how well a direct mail advertising campaign is working is to track each mailing and measure the results. Actually, the results of your first mailing will exist in a “vacuum” because you have nothing to compare them against. But subsequent mailings (and variations within them) will begin to reveal useful information about which techniques are working the best.
Learn more about testing direct mail
Brandon Cornett is the publisher of PostcardSmart.com.
