Over the years, direct mail has proven its ability to drive growth for companies. A well-thought out and executed direct mail campaign can provide profit, sustainability and security perhaps better than any other media.

Some may think direct mail is outdated, too expensive or cumbersome. But just because other ways may be faster, easier or less expensive, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll see profitable, long-term ROI. You need to look at direct mail in the right way though — to see it in context of its overall worth. Direct mail offers the ability to reach and gain the attention of prospects suited to your products and services, which when measured against other lead sources can deliver a higher lifetime customer value for your business.

And part of the power of direct mail comes from the ability to zero in on your specific audience. It allows you to reach the right people – the people most likely to be interested in your specific product or service. The way this happens begins with the list you mail to (or email to for that matter).

So let’s just focus on lists for this post and make sure we have all the basics about them covered. To begin with, we can think of them as two main types: house lists and rented lists. Your house file or customer file is golden. These are the people that have bought or contacted you and that you have collected information on and stored in your database.

Having a useable database is paramount to your success. The more information you have collected on people means the more ways you can segment your file. Initially, if it seems overwhelming, you can begin the segmentation process by splitting people into these three groups.

1. Single Buyer File – purchased a single product from you
2. Multi Buyer File – purchased more than one product from you
3. Inquiry Only File – either contacted, called or made a inquiry from your website, or after seeing your ad, but hasn’t purchased

With these three groups, you can break them into smaller segments based on how the lead was generated. If you’re using a CRM system like Salesforce, whena person’s information is entered in you can specify where the lead came from — down to the exact source even. This helps you determine future marketing and promotions efforts. So for your A, B, and C groups you can segment by how you market. For example,

1. Internet-generated – display ads, organic search, social media ads
2. Radio/TV spots
3. Direct mail
4. Print Ads – publications, newspapers, newsletters

Now, you have to have an understanding of your sales cycle, is it long or short? You can further segment your list by how recently people bought or were added to the database. Also, by how much they spent. And remember when you’re pulling the list to not include any contacts that are flagged for service issues or are marked as do not contact.

Organizing your house file for a campaign is a great way to start creating customer profiles for your business. Grouping by the criteria above can help you see what zip codes your best customers live in and other demographic information about them.

This is important because your best guide to future prospects is understanding who your current customers are now.

In our next post when we talk about what you need to know about renting lists, the characteristics you’ve uncovered from your house list will come in handy. You want your rented lists to be made up of people who look just like your existing customers.

The post Direct Mail House Lists Rule – Part 1 appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Direct Mail Statistics

Stats for direct mail might surprise you. The response rate is high, even among young audiences. ROI, however, may be lacking when you compare direct mail to its digital counterpart: email.

• Best response rate: 5.1% response rate , according to the DMA. By comparison, email and paid search receive a 0.6% response rate and social media receives 0.4%
• Young is not done: Despite being among the most tech-savvy, 18-21 year olds have a response rate of 12.4% to direct mail.
• ROI, not as high: To be fair, direct does better than paid search. Direct mail sees a 29% ROI; direct mail sees a 23% return. Social media, however, does better (30%). Email blows all the others away at 124% ROI. (Psst… check out our latest blogs on email marketing – one on data and one covering storytelling, AI, and emojis.)
• Size matters: Oversized envelopes have a response rate of 6.6%. Postcards’ response rate is 5.7% and letter-sized is 4.3%. Their ROI is higher too. Oversized ROI is 37%.

Reasons to Use Direct Mail

The stats definitely can lead to some pause for consideration. Response rate is great, but what about ROI? Here are 4 reasons to move forward and implement some direct mail marketing in your strategy, courtesy of Full Tilt Direct.

It’s Targeted and Familiar

Direct mail campaigns are extremely targeted to a specific audience. There is a much greater chance of communicating with the right customer at the right time. Direct mail has been trusted for over 100 years. It has been proven that over time people have grown to be sceptical of email campaigns.

It’s Popular and Proven

Over 70% of consumers still want print ads despite the emergence of digital ad usage. In one year,  marketers spent over $150 billion on direct marketing, which accounted for over 54% of all advertising expenditures in the United States. Because direct mail has been in wide use for such a long time, there has been huge amounts of data proving its effectiveness.

It’s Lasting and Versatile

Direct mail has a greater chance of being seen than email. A physical piece of paper leaves a lasting impression. Because the customer can physically touch the message, they see it as more trustworthy.

It’s Personalized and Effective

Direct mail pieces can be customized to feel more personable. This results in a product that feels more trustworthy and leads to a greater chance of landing the customer. Direct mail makes the customer feel emotionally charged and valued. Customers are far more likely to notice, open, read, and enjoy mail than digital forms of advertising. Direct mail creates a call to action that resonates.

Direct Mail: Something to Consider

From personalization to trustworthiness, to physical reminders, there are plenty of reasons to use direct mail. Response rate is also higher than other mediums, which is great. The one idea that may give us some pause is the ROI of direct mail vs. email. The ROI argument makes a strong case for email over direct mail. That’s a decision you’ll have to consider for your business. Which one would you choose? Would you do both? Multiple touchpoints often is effective; so maybe combining the power of the two would be effective? Your best bet is to test both forms and discover which is most effective for your business. It’s not one-size-fits-all.

Other Direct Mail Resources:

Direct Mail Best Practices – Part 1

Direct Mail Best Practices – Part 2

Direct Mail for B2b – 5 Tips!

The post Is Direct Mail Dead? appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

Thanks again to Eric Gagnon, contributor to Tuesday Marketing Notes (TMN) of the Business Marketing Institute, we would like to share the insight provided in Tuesday Marketing Notes: Executing Your Company’s B2B Direct Mail Projects

Direct Mail Package Design

Next to your mailing list, the direct mail package is the most important element in your company’s direct mail projects. The copywriting, design, production, and printing of your direct mail package consumes the most time of any other step in your direct mail projects, but it can be executed concurrently with the mailing list selection process (which we outlined in last week’s TMN here).

If your direct mail project is a brand-new mailing list test, or a new mailing to your company’s customer and prospect lists, you must factor in the longer lead time required for your agency or direct mail consultant to develop a completely new direct mail package for this project.

If you are “rolling out” from a successful direct mail test, and/or mailing one of your company’s existing mailing pieces, the task of designing and producing your mailing’s direct mail piece is already done, so the time required to scale up your mailings is limited only by the time required to print more of these materials for your mailing.

Developing A New Direct Mail Campaign

When developing a new direct mail package—that is, a mailing piece having mostly new and unproven elements, and being mailed for the very first time—your first step is to decide on the rough shape this direct mail piece should take.

Are you making a “big,” or a “little,” announcement? “Big,” important mailings, such as new product launches and major sales promotions, generally require you to stay with the proven, envelope-bound direct mail formats, consisting of an outer envelope, sales cover letter, brochure, and reply card, in either the larger 9 X 12 format, or common letter-size (#10) mailing piece. This is also the least risky and most proven format for mailings to outside, rented mailing lists, whose added list rental expense will raise the stakes on any mailing project.

When your marketing project requires that you present, explain, and sell the complex features and benefits of your company’s product or service, the print “real estate” provided by the four individual elements of the envelope-bound direct mail package—the envelope, cover letter, brochure, and reply coupon—give you four separate opportunities to get your sales message across to your potential prospects.

The self-mailer alternative: If, on the other hand, you are planning a mailing that has a “simple” story that can be easily and effectively explained in less space (and your mailing project does not bear the extra expense of renting outside mailing lists), your direct mail piece can take the form of a simpler, one-piece self-mailer format.

Examples of these kinds of mailings using a self-mailer format would include seasonal or one-time sales promotion announcements to your company’s existing customer or prospect lists, “news” announcements, such as industry awards given to your product or company, or other spot promotions and announcements mailed to your company’s “captive” customer and prospect lists.

When in doubt, go with “three pieces in an envelope:” Whenever you are faced with the task of developing a direct mail piece for a completely new marketing project in your company—especially one that involves the launch of a brand-new product, or a product in a new and untested market, it’s best to stay with the conventional, “three-pieces-in-an-envelope” letter-size (or larger) direct mail format.

This format is not only the most proven direct mail format used in most mailing projects, it also gives you four different opportunities to present, explain, sell, and close the recipients of your mailing—through the outer envelope, the sales cover letter, the brochure, and the “call to action” reply card. Most important, this format also minimizes the risk of not providing your prospects with sufficient information to motivate them to take the next step closer to buying your product.

Timing and Planning Your Direct Mail

After you consider the general type of direct mail package required for an upcoming mailing, you need to work with your marketing agency or direct mail consultant to develop and produce the direct mail package. This section covers the key steps involved in the planning, development, and execution of direct mail packages.

Step 1: Your Direct Mail Package- What Do You Want to Say, How are You Going to Say It?

As a marketing manager, your first task in developing a direct mail package is to sketch out the requirements and basic sales copy the mailing piece should contain. The point of this exercise is not to be doing your Marketing agency’s job for them by writing the direct mail piece, but to lead the process by giving your team a list of the minimum sales copy points to be included in the mailing piece, along with any other direction you think they will find helpful for the project.

Questions to Ask Your Marketing Agency in a Direct Mail Campaign

• Who is the direct mail audience? Describe your mailing list(s) and the characteristics of the people whose names are on them—their job titles, demographics, and previous buying history with your company (if any);

• What are the key benefits of your product or service? List the key sales benefits of the product or service offered in the mailing. Identify and describe the most important benefit, followed by next-important sales benefit, etc.;

• What is Your Call to Action? What is the offer and call to action for this mailing? List the price of the product or service featured in the mailing piece, and (if offered) the special terms you’re extending for the promotion. This can be stated as the answer to the question: “What special offer are you willing to make to the prospect if they are willing to respond to your mailing, right now, and what must they do to take advantage of this special offer?” Are there any other terms or limitations to this mailing’s special offer (i.e., what language do your company’s lawyers want you to include in this mailing)?

How Do You Want to Call Your Readers to Action? Covered in TMN #3 (accessible here ) should provide you with sufficient background for sketching out the key sales benefits and copy points of your mailing for your marketing agency or consultant.

Step 2: Direct Mail Package Copy, Development and Production

Once you’ve handed over your sales copy outline and notes to your agency, the next one or two weeks are a process of going back and forth with your agency or marketing consultant, molding and refining the direct mail package for your mailing project.

Proofing Your Direct Mail

Once you receive a .PDF proof of your mailing package, print it out, read and review it, mark it up with your changes and edits, then FAX your changes back to your marketing agency. This process will be repeated a few more times as you and your marketing agency or marketing consultant work together to refine the mailing piece to its final form.

At this stage, it’s important not to run through too many of these proofing and correction cycles. once a deliverable is corrected more than three times, the process tends to devolve into an endless loop of unnecessary corrections that serve no purpose other than to delay your mailing.

Create a mockup of your direct mail piece: Once you believe your direct mail package is getting very close to its final form, print out the .PDFs of the individual elements of your direct mail package—envelope, sales letter, brochure, reply card, etc—and fold and assemble them to create a simple, printed mockup of the mailing package roughly approximating the piece you’ll mail to your prospects. If you’re producing an envelope-bound package, tape the layout for the envelope to the front of a real envelope; then fold and assemble the pieces into the envelope exactly as they’d be prepared for the actual mailing.

Look at your mockup with “new eyes:” Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient of the mailing, and imagine that you are seeing this mailing piece for the very first time, having no prior knowledge of what’s in it.

First, look at the outer envelope—does its sales copy intrigue you enough to open the envelope? Next, open the envelope of your mockup and examine the contents of the direct mail piece; take a close look especially at how the individual pieces of your mailing package “fall out” of the envelope, into your hand. Pay close attention to the individual pieces of your mailing: Are the main, bold headlines on your brochure clear and bold, and do they adequately convey the main sales message of your company’s product? Do the sales copy points printed on the other individual pieces of your mailing communicate the other chief benefits of your company’s product?

Get into the habit of printing out the .PDFs of the direct mail package elements, assembling them into mockups of their final, mailed form, and looking at these pieces with “new eyes.” It’s an invaluable exercise for helping you see your direct mail materials (and all other marketing collateral, for that matter) as your customers and prospects see them for the first time. The more you develop this skill, the more effective your company’s marketing collateral will become.

Who else should review the mailing piece? Marketing managers often fall into the trap of letting too many other people review and comment on proof copies of direct mail and other marketing materials under development. This nearly always leads to additional delays in execution and production of your direct mail materials, resulting in lost marketing opportunities and, ultimately—lost sales. Revising marketing materials many more times than is necessary can actually reduce the quality and effectiveness of your final product.

Wherever possible, keep your marketing copy and layouts away from all but the fewest number of people who need to review them. Ideally, marketing materials under development should only be reviewed by three people—you, your company’s sales manager, and your company’s CEO. At larger companies, the company lawyer must also review all marketing copy. Give all of your reviewers hard deadlines on their review of your project materials, and be careful not to let these deadlines slip.

Once you’ve cut back on the number of people who review your company’s marketing materials, also cut the number of times your direct mail materials are reviewed, edited, and sent back to your agency for revision. There should be no more than two of these “revision cycles” for any direct mail project; any more than this, you’re losing valuable time on your project.

Get a postage estimate from your lettershop: As soon as you’ve finalized the direct mail package for a mailing, send a mockup of the piece over to your lettershop, along with the other pertinent details of the mailing, such as the quantity of names to be mailed, and the postal rate (First-Class or bulk rate).

Your lettershop can then estimate the total amount of the postage needed for your mailing. Since lettershops require your postage expenses be paid in advance of the mailing, it may take your accounting department a week or so to cut a postage check and send it to the lettershop, so start this process early enough to avoid a mailing delay.

Questions about improving your direct mail campaigns? Contact Chief Marketing Officer Neil Brown at Modern Marketing Partners to see how we can help you.

Related Resources

B2B Direct Mail Projects Part 1: Mailing List Selection and Execution (Business Marketing Institute)

Catalog Marketing Best Practices (Modern Marketing University)

2013: Direct Mail Marketing Statistics (Printing Industries Alliance)

Feel free to bookmark, comment, and share using the tools below.

The post Direct Mail Best Practices: Part 2 appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

With special thanks to Eric Gagnon, contributor to the Business Marketing Institute, we would like to share the insight provided in Tuesday Marketing Notes: Executing Your Company’s B2B Direct Mail Projects

Benefits of Direct Mail Campaigns

Next to a promising mailing list and a hard-hitting, effective direct mail package, rapid, timely execution and diligent oversight are the two most important factors in any direct mail project. By their nature, direct mailings require the coordinated effort of several members of your marketing team—your ad agency (or direct mail marketing consultant), and your mailing list broker, printer, and lettershop. After the mailing is sent out, you will need the cooperation of your company’s sales reps, customer service, and administrative staff to follow up, track, and respond to prospect inquiries from these mailings.

While the direct mail package is being produced and printed, mailing lists must be researched, selected, ordered, and then forwarded to your lettershop, where they will be processed for personalized output. Several suppliers may be involved in the execution of your direct mail projects, and your mailing projects will require certain key steps to be performed at critical times during the project.

Each of these critical tasks relies on successful and timely completion of the previous step, so it, in turn, can be handed off to the next vendor. Close communication and coordination between the members of your direct mail marketing team—agency, printer, list broker, and lettershop—is the vital element that keeps a mailing project on schedule, a marketing program on track, and, ultimately, your company’s sales growing at a steady rate.

In your role as a marketing manager, you may not have direct, hands-on involvement in the direct mail execution steps described here. In most cases, your ad agency or direct mail consultant will be responsible for ordering mailing lists, producing the direct mail package for the mailing project, and day-to-day execution of the mailing. However, the most successful marketing managers in direct mail projects are those who stay closely engaged to the process.

However, you must be familiar enough with each of the steps involved to know how each task is executed, and you must know why a particular task must be executed at a specific point in the project. The engaged, hands-on marketing manager who has a basic working knowledge of the process knows enough to anticipate problems in direct mail projects before they occur, and if necessary, will step in and take action to correct these problems before they lead to delays in execution.

Step 1: Mailing List Selection (Estimated Execution Time: 1- 2 Weeks)

All direct mail projects begin with a mailing list. Always decide on the mailing lists you’re going to use before deciding on any other aspect of your mailing project. The mailing list you select influences the other key elements of your mailing, such as how to shape and focus your sales message to the individuals targeted by the list, how to develop the content and makeup of the mailing piece sent to the list, and how to create the sales promotion used in this mailing piece for this list. If possible, try to order or develop your mailing lists before you begin work on the direct mail package, so your lettershop will have sufficient time to prepare those lists and have them ready by the time your direct mail package arrives at their shop.

A mailing list may also be the catalyst which initiates a direct mail opportunity. For example, your company may form a joint business venture with a strategic partner who provides your company with a valuable new mailing list of its customers and prospects, for which a direct mail package must be developed. In other cases, you’ll have to execute a mailing to your own company’s internal customer and sales prospects lists for a new sales promotion, or for a new product launch. And, of course, you will also be researching, selecting, and renting outside mailing lists for your company’s ongoing sales lead and inquiry-generation direct mail programs.

Mailing lists for any direct mail project come from either an internal source, such as your company’s own customer, prospect, and inquiry databases, or from external sources, such as rented lists from publications or mailing list brokers.

Developing an Internal Direct Mailing List

The process of selecting mailing lists from internal sources, such as your company’s own customer and prospect lists, is mostly one of thoughtful selection and competent database processing. Most mailing list processing tasks involving any single mailing list database having up to 50,000 names (this encompasses all types of business direct mail projects) can be readily managed, processed, and output from any desktop PC, using common database programs, such as Microsoft Excel or FileMaker Pro.

If you are in charge of marketing in a small to mid-sized company, and are responsible for maintaining your company’s mailing lists, it’s a good idea to develop some basic database processing skills, by learning to use programs like Microsoft Excel, or, better yet—a dedicated database program like FileMaker Pro.

If you are a marketing manager at a larger company, it’s likely your sales database is managed by your company’s IT staff, and you will have to ask for a “database dump” whenever you need a mailing list. Even if you’re not personally in control of your company’s key sales databases, you’ll need to provide your IT staff with very specific instructions for your mailing list request.

Timeliness of database records for a mailing is an important mailing list attribute. If it’s important for you to select only those names of customers, prospects and inquiries who have been added to your company’s database after a certain date, make this selection criteria very clear to your company’s technical person handling your mailing list request. Most higher-end database software can tag a database entry by its “date created,” so even if a specific field has not been created, these names can be selected according to the date they were added to your company’s database. In some cases, you may want to mail to “inactive” customers, those customers who have not ordered from your company beyond a certain date, or older, “aged” prospects on your prospect or inquiry lists. In either case, the ability to retrieve names from your sales database by their “date created” field is critical.

Other list selection criteria: When making your list request, you must give careful consideration to the characteristics of the customers and sales prospects you are selecting from your company’s database. For example:

• Customer sales volume: Do you want your mailing to reach only those customers whose total annual sales volume with your company is greater than (or less than) a certain dollar amount?
• Customer product orders: Would your mailing be more effective if you only targeted previous customers who bought specific product models?
• Screening customers: Conversely, would your mailing be more effective if you excluded certain customers or prospects, such as those belonging to a certain business line or industry classification?

Because a single “inclusion” or “exclusion” of certain groups of customers and prospects from your company’s database can make a significant difference in sales response generated from a mailing, you should carefully consider your desired selection criteria when developing mailing lists from your company’s database.

Mailing list accuracy: To some degree, most companies suffer from poor data entry and inconsistent sales record keeping practices in their internal customer and prospect databases. These problems result in poorly spelled or mistyped address information fields, out-of-date contact name and title fields, and major mailing list problems, such as undeliverable mailing addresses and transposed or missing fields. Most companies compound these errors by sending their mailing lists directly to their ad agency or lettershop without a careful visual inspection by the marketing manager or other responsible person. These problems are spotted only at the very last minute before a mailing list is to be processed, but not soon enough to avoid a significant mailing delay.

How to Inspect Your Direct Mail Recipient List

It’s essential that you take personal responsibility for visually inspecting every mailing list used in your company’s (or client’s) direct mail projects. Make sure to check every mailing list for the following:

• Database fields: Check for obvious database field problems, such as transposed fields (switched company and address fields, for example), and skipped or missing fields in the mailing list database;
• Mailing addresses: Check for old, out-of-date, or undeliverable mailing addresses on your mailing lists. It often helps to have your sales manager and sales reps visually inspect address information on their key customers and accounts as a part of this process;
• Presentation: Check for other obvious problems, such as incorrect salutations (Mr., Ms.), and misspelled names, companies, and cities, new people hired at companies on your list, incorrect Zip codes, etc.

At best, database-related problems with mailing lists are the leading cause of delays in direct mail projects. At their worst, undetected problems in mailing list databases can kill a mailing’s sales and inquiry response rates.

External Mailings: Preparing a Mailing List

If your direct mail project is an extension, or “rollout” of a successfully completed test mailing of a list rented from an external source, the specifications of your list order for the extension (such as job titles, company size, or other special list selection criteria) specified in your initial test should be duplicated exactly in your mailing extension, so your larger rollout reflects the identical profile that made your original test mailing a success.

In other words, don’t change any of your list selection criteria when it’s working: If your original test worked well with a list selection based on a job title selection for all “Vice Presidents of Marketing” available on the list, then order the same job title selection, as well as all other specific list selections, that you specified for the list order from your original test. Make changes to your selection criteria only when you have exhausted all available names matching your selection criteria, and then test these new selections of the list with another small test mailing.

Lists “excludes” from rented lists: If you are placing a new order for additional new names on a mailing list, as a result of a successful prior test mailing to that list, make sure to specify that the names you just mailed for your test be excluded on your new list order. To do this, make sure to include the following language on your mailing list order: “Exclude all names from previous list order of [date].” List brokers and their mailing list data-processing services keep track of the individual records on previously ordered lists, by customer and order, so it’s a simple matter for them to exclude these names so these individuals won’t receive your same mailing twice.

List rental order requirements: Mailing list owners or brokers require you to submit a sample of your direct mail piece along with your list order, at the time of your order. This can be an actual sample of the printed mailing piece, or a .PDF or laser-printed proof copy if it has not yet been printed. If you are ordering through a mailing list broker, this mailing sample is then passed along to the list owner for their review and approval. Mailing lists are rented for one-time use only, and are “seeded” with a few addresses known only to the list owner, so that the list owner or broker can monitor whether or not a list has been used more than once by any mailer.

Timing and mechanics of rented list orders: Mailing lists can generally be received and in-hand within 1-2 weeks of your list order and sample mailing piece submission. For their own “security purposes,” list owners and mailing list brokers generally ship mailing lists only to lettershops, which makes it inconvenient for you to visually inspect the list. However, some mailing list brokers and list owners are more flexible on this point than others, so it doesn’t hurt to ask them to send their mailing lists directly to you. As an alternative, you could also ask your lettershop to send you a copy of the mailing list file by e-mail for inspection purposes only once they receive the disk or file from the list owner.

Inspecting rented mailing lists: Mailing lists rented from list brokers and other outside mailing list suppliers, like trade publications or industry associations, suffer far less from the mailing list inaccuracies, undeliverable addresses, and other common mishaps that often occur in a company’s in-house processing of its own mailing list databases. This is because mailing list suppliers are indeed in the business of building, selling, and processing mailing lists, so their business depends on the delivery of accurate and reliable mailing lists. The fact that mailing list providers process and ship many mailing lists each day also helps them to achieve reliability through repetition. Nonetheless, you must be just as insistent on inspecting outside, rented mailing lists as you should be on inspecting your company’s in-house mailing lists.

Looking for More information on Planning and Executing a Direct Mail Campaign? Contact Modern Marketing Partners, a Naperville Based B2B Marketing Agency, to receive more details.

Related Resources

Direct Mail for B2B – 5 Tips (Modern Marketing University)

Direct Mail Package Design, Copy, and Production (Business Marketing Institute)

Direct Marketing Statistical Fact Book (Direct Marketing Association)

Feel free to comment, bookmark, and share using the tools below

The post Direct Mail Best Practices: Part 1 appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.

But how can you incorporate direct mail into a B2B multichannel marketing strategy? Chief Marketer interviewed Michele Fitzpatrick from The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks and Kevin Kerner from Mason Zimbler US on this topic. Below you will find 5 tips on using direct mail in a B2B multichannel strategy from the interview.

1. Make it Meaningful

In order to grab the attention of your audience, your direct mail needs to be relevant to their needs at the exact moment that they receive it. Smartphones have granted customers access to everything 24/7. This means that customers expect increased relevancy and timeliness of information. These changes in customer expectations have carried over to direct mail as well. Paper mail should be meaningful to a customer’s particular needs!

2. Mail is only one part of a multichannel strategy

“Broad scale campaigns still have their place, but if I’m [currently] your customer,  mail has to be relevant,” Fitzpatrick says, adding that the ability to connect with a customer effectively in multiple channels can often double or triple revenue. “If you’re not thinking about the role of mail in that context, you’re missing an opportunity.”

Kerner provides an example of how to fit mail into your multichannel strategy. You could first send an email teaser, which alerts the recipient that a direct mail piece is coming with more information. Then, the direct mail piece could have a URL directing them to a dedicated landing page with offer and an invitation to set up an appointment.

3. Always start with your audience first

When you begin creating a direct mail campaign, your target audience should be your first thought! “Channel, offer, product, timing—these are all byproducts of who you are trying to reach,” Fitzpatrick says. “Audience should be 50% of the weight of the campaign’s [approach].

Also, it is important to note that role of the direct mail will vary depending on where the customer is in their buying cycle. A piece of physical mail may be useful in their research process, where they are really trying to understand the product, and physical mail allows them to compare features. Overall, direct mail can be used at all stages in sales cycle.

4. Understand what you can spend to get the ROI you need

“Direct mail is a bit of an underused asset, particularly in B2B, and if used correctly, it can be a really effective tactic,” says Kerner. “But you have to know what you can spend to acquire a customer.”

Due to increasing postage costs, direct mail is more costly than some other marketing techniques. Therefore, it is even more crucial to understand budgets/ROI. If you find direct mail to be too costly there is still the option to decrease volume, the key is targeting properly. If targeted properly, your direct mail campaign can still be a success!

5. Consider going big in B2B Direct Mail

Dimensional mailings can help break through the “clutter” if your customer has a lot of competition for their time and attention.

“For a time, dimensional mail went out of fashion with the advent of digital,” says Kerner. “But because dimensional mail is high impact, if you want to get a person to respond and pull them online, this can be a great way to do it.”

How do you use direct mail in your B2B marketing strategy? Share your experiences with direct mail marketing in the comment box below and retweet, Facebook like, and share this post with your colleagues interested in direct mail marketing!

The post Direct Mail for B2B – 5 Tips! appeared first on Modern Marketing Partners.