Do you
include tear-off response cards or other forms in your direct marketing pieces?
If so, do you send them blank? Or do you pre-fill them with readily available
information (recipient’s name, address, product serial numbers, seminar dates) to
make responses as easy as possible?
If you
are sending blank forms, you are leaving money on the table. Why? Because the
more steps recipients must take to respond to your offer, the less likely they
are to do it. Conversely, the easier you make it for them to respond, the more
likely they are to do it.
Take
the example of one marketer that had been promoting its customer education
seminars with a self-mailer that included the dates and details of upcoming
workshops. The mailers included a detachable reply card for registration. After
more than two years, however, most of the registrations were still coming
through the company’s website or sales reps, not the direct mailers it was
paying for.
The marketer
decided to switch gears. It freshened up the design and moved to a heavier
coated stock. It also ditched its static response forms and began pre-filling
them so all that recipients had to do was add the stamp and drop the cards in
the mail. The company received such a bump in its registrations that it had to
add an extra seminar session!
If you are
sending reply cards, there is no reason not to pre-fill them. After all, the
data you need is most likely in your marketing database already, and we have
the skills and the equipment to make the entire process easy for you.
Want to get a
quick and easy boost to your response rates? Talk to us about prefilling the
response forms and reply cards in your next print campaign!
Jeff Lampert
Director of Marketing & Business Development
“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars — I look for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” —Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO
