ARTICLES____>> Back

When to Use Direct Mail:
Direct mail is one of the most targeted, measurable, and cost-effective ways to sell your products and services.Use direct mail if you want to:
Be precise and eliminate wasted effort and expense.
You can deliver your message directly into the hands of the specific individual or company you are targeting, which eliminates wasted effort and sales expense.
Extend your reach.
As you grow your organization, you will want to expand the number of prospects that you reach, with the desired outcome of turning those prospects into customers.
Measure results and profitability.
Your cost per respondent or lead, cost per order and overall profitability are easy to evaluate.
Collect and analyze vital prospecting information.
By recording each contact, response and needs, you can develop a relationship with your prospects and customers, predict buying potential and fine-tune the information for developing a relationship with your prospects.
Define Your Objectives:
For a greater return on your direct mail dollars, first define your program's specific objectives. For example, you may want your program to:
* Generate sales more cost effectively
* Contact more prospects at a lower cost per sale
* Produce qualified leads for your salespeople
* Penetrate territories not covered by your sales force
* Build awareness of your products and services
* Generate website traffic Generate traffic at trade shows or
* Conduct market research
Once your objectives are firmly in place, determine and direct your sales efforts to the types of businesses you want to reach.
Identify/Differentiate Your Markets:
To select your markets, first identify the industries that are buying your products and services now. A close examination of your existing customer base can reveal very useful information, such as lines of business, company size and value you assign to different types of organizations. Other companies with similar attributes may be good prospects. If you don't have customer information, examine the markets that are most likely to need your products or services. Consider key characteristics such as line of business, national or strategic account potential, geographic region. With your objectives and markets identified, you can now choose the mailing lists that will reach the best prospects and assure the largest return on your marketing dollars.
Select Your Best Prospects:
Consider the relative importance of these direct mail components to a campaign's success:
List - 60%
Offer - 20%
Copy - 15%
Format (layout, type of envelope, etc.) - 5%
Nothing is more important than the segments you mail to! Time spent up-front on list identification, will be well spent!
Differentiate Your Mailing List:
Using powerful criteria, you can customize your list to increase the effectiveness of your mailing. The following will provide a good guide:
Select the appropriate classification codes.
The government's 4-digit SIC Codes let you target specific lines of business. These SIC numbers may correspond to your current "best customer" in order for you to correlate success.
Define your geographic coverage.
Identify the geographic area that will help you reach markets in a given territory by using these selectors: zip codes, entire U.S., selected states, counties, cities, telephone area codes.
Determine the sales potential at each location.
Assess the buying potential of companies with multiple locations by defining the activity at each site. To reach top decision makers, focus on headquarters or subsidiary locations. Single location companies and manufacturing sites may have a separate need for your products or services. If only new companies and/or subsidiaries are your marketing target, you can select on the business start date. Use selection criteria to identify manufacturing locations, non-manufacturing locations, subsidiaries, single location companies and the year a business started if available.
Reach the right executive.
Specify decision makers by title or functional responsibility.
Cut the number of wasted telephone calls.
Telemarketing can play an important role in your direct mail program. To test the effectiveness, you can call a representative sampling.
Identify new possibilities for higher profit.
Target the freshest prospects by choosing newly established companies just entering a market, new legal entities or recent changes in legal structures, changes in ownership, changes in CEO, company name changes, address and telephone number changes.
Reduce mailing costs.
To further improve cost-efficiency, take advantage of postal discount options including Carrier Route Code, presort and bar coding. By sorting your mail and making it machine-readable before it gets to the post office you can save more on postage.