Direct Mail: The Package Mission Control

Direct marketing has been a fad long enough for people to stop caring about the content of letters and postcards that they receive inadvertently. The trick is to keep coming up with striking strategies that might not be new to everyone, but that are fresh enough to create enough hype for your direct mail campaign.

You might have already seen and tried all the strategies you think you need and it probably doesn’t make much sense to repeat the same things. So presented here is just one major facet in direct marketing with the most important points compounded together for an effective mission control.

The gist: Find out what’s lacking.

If your campaign isn’t working or results are stagnant over a considerable period of time, something must be missing. So you know your target market and you know every inch of your product. But do you do enough to reach out to the part of the world that needs you? As you go on, you might want ask yourself the following questions to know what your direct mail campaign is lacking:

§  Are my packages providing relevant content? One of the biggest mistakes of direct marketers is executing something that has little or no relevance to what they’re advertising. For example, a fashion business would mail out flyers with a photo of some place on it instead of something more like gowns or headdresses. It could be that the photo shows the fashion capital in the country, but even some Harvard-graduated designers wouldn’t be able to tell. Keep it simple and straightforward with a classy presentation and you won’t lose potential clients due to poor targeting.

§  Are my packages personalized as best they can be? If you know your target market well, you’ll know how to resonate with them. Their needs and interests are what you want to address as a company or independent business owner. Use whatever resources you have on hand to produce custom packages that will best represent your business. To make your messages really relevant, use variable data printing that allows you to change the message to fit your audience better. This way you can say one thing to a frequent shopper and something else to someone who just shops with you twice a year.

§  Am I tracking my marketing channels? In a world where everything is digital, we can’t help but blend in to make marketing campaigns more effective. By using QR codes, personalized URLs, website tools, and the like, marketers can track activities done on the client’s end. This gives businesses valuable data about how the campaign is doing so that adjustments can be made and studied until your advertising is maximized. If you don’t have any of these digital technologies working for you yet, high visibility is not something you will likely achieve, and you may not even know how much better you can do.

Brainstorm with your team and think up other strategies, no matter how strange they may seem at first, and test them out against the criteria above. You may be surprised to find what can be effective to enhance your direct marketing campaigns.

Mike Baber