5 Direct Mail “Must Dos”

Want to ensure that your direct mail is in line with today’s best practices? Here are 5 items that should be on every marketer’s “must do” list.

1. Focus on relevance, not volume: Marketers are moving away from commoditized, undifferentiated direct mail. They are leveraging customer demographics, purchase patterns, and preferences to increase response rates and drive revenue growth. According to a March 2014 study from Adobe,[1] “personalization” ranked #1 on marketers’ lists of priorities this year.

2. Sometimes less is more: By focus on creating relevance, not volume, this often means smaller, more targeted mailings. Only with personalized, relevance-based marketing can you mail less and get more.

3. Think efficiency: Better data cleansing and updating of mailing lists (eliminating UAA, or “undeliverable as addressed” mail) not only increases marketing efficiency, but it saves on postage, too.

4. Use triggered mail: Marketing effectiveness increases when you are mailing at the very time the customer is ready to buy. “Triggered” messaging does just that. Take an automotive manufacturer that sends out 1:1 mailers to alert customers when their vehicles are due for scheduled maintenance based on their last service call. Or a florist that advertises discounts to customers with family members with birthdays or anniversaries that week. Triggered mail magnifies the impact of personalization.

5. Be willing to stretch yourself: Don’t get stuck in a rut. In the same Adobe study, 54% of marketers said they believe the ideal marketer should take more risks and 45% hope to take more risks themselves. How will you know what works best for you if you don’t stretch yourself by trying something new once in awhile?

Talk to us about new ideas and new techniques for personalizing, using triggers, and increasing the relevance of your campaigns to boost your results.

¹ “Digital Roadblock: Marketers Struggle to Reinvent Themselves” (Adobe, March 2014)

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.

Matt Biondi

Can 1:1 Printing Save You Money? Yes!

Most marketers define the success of a print marketing campaign in terms of what they gain — responses, conversions, or dollars flowing into the cash register. But you can also define success by the money you save. Let’s look at three ways 1:1 printing can improve the bottom line through cost savings, not just boosting responses and revenues.  

1. Lower cost of attrition. If your goal is to prevent customer attrition, you can evaluate the success of your campaign based on what sales stay rather than what sales merely come in. One marketer of high-end vacations saved millions, for example, by sending vacationers 100% personalized booklets that reinforce their vacation choices. Its cancellation rates plummeted, and it kept customer sales where they belonged — in its pockets.

2. Less handholding. What if you could use 1:1 printing to reduce calls to your customer service team? Questions about invoicing and payment cost real money. By personalizing its tax letters, for example, one state government’s tax bureau made these letters easier to read. The result was a noticeable drop in calls to its call centers, and the state saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3. Faster response times. The faster customers pay, the better your cash flow. Take the example above. By using personalized printing to make its statements easier to read, this state government not only reduced the number of taxpayer calls, but it started receiving its revenues days earlier. As a result, it significantly boosted its earnings from interest.

Not included in this case study but very real to most marketers is the fact that more on-time payments also mean less time and money spent on duplicate invoicing and follow-up calls for non-payment.

Reducing customer attrition and making their invoices and customer statements easier to read and understand are not the “sexy” benefits of 1:1 printing we hear about the most, but they are real, bottom-line benefits that do not get talked about enough!

Jeff Lampert

Director of Marketing & Business Development

It's not the will to win that matters--everyone has that.  It's the will to prepare to win that matters.

Paul "Bear" Bryant