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8 Steps for Successful Direct Mail Campaign

think-ink-marketing

Mail marketing is a tricky domain, lots of mails are frequently left unread, and getting your emails read by your current clients and prospective customers is a commendable feat. In this article, we are going to cover some of the elements that you should consider while starting your mail marketing strategy.

  • Know your purpose
  • Know your audience
  • Create an excellent and useful mailing list
  • Decide on your campaign
  • Design your unique mailpiece
  • Choosing A Printer
  • Posting your letters
  • Don’t forget to do a sample test first!

1.  Know Your Purpose

Whether you’re a small business or a large one, an effective marketing strategy can help your business grow and gain more customers. One such marketing strategy is direct mail. Direct Mail has matured and evolved during the years, but before you go on investing in direct mail, you will first need to assess your needs and determine whether they fit your criteria or not.

If you’re a small enterprise, will utilizing the services of direct mail help you to gain more customers or make your existing customers more regular? Where do you want to attract your customers, Your website, social media, or any other digital resource? What do you aim to achieve by using direct mail to market your cause?

Before making any investments in direct mail, knowing your purpose is indispensable, it is also essential to examine and evaluate your existing marketing efforts and work around how direct mail can help complement them. A great way to do that is to find channels through which you can use direct mail to bring customer traffic to your digital forums.

2.  Know Your Audience

For any marketing campaign is to know and understand your audience is vital. You should be familiar with the different niches that your brand targets and tailor your marketing strategies to their requirements. In this time and age, collecting data about your audience is relatively simple, and you have many tools at your disposal, i.e., in the form of surveys, ratings, and feedback forms.

One way to identify the general type of customers your business attracts is by observing the kind of customer engagements your online forums get. It also may not be a bad idea to check out online customer reviews as well to know how customers are describing your products and services. Identify your customers’ behaviors and shopping preferences.

You can also coordinate your site’s digital and direct mail efforts to monitor user activity and follow them up with personalized online mails that could prompt them to make a purchase. In many industries, often customers leave the forms half-filled with their details. It may not be a bad idea to incentivize them to complete their purchase by offering them discounts or any other added benefits.

3.  Create A Good and Effective Mailing List

A good mailing list is beneficial for several reasons. If you haven’t prompted your customers to provide contact information online, now is the best time to do that. Your customer mailing list is precious since, through it, you can contact your existing customers with information and new deals and offers. It is easier to market your old customers for a new product that you are introducing than trying to capture new clients.

There are loads of mailing lists available for sale as well for which you need to contact your broker. Consultation with your broker can help you figure out the most effective mailing list to best suit your marketing campaign.

4.  Decide on your Campaign

The trickiest part of any marketing campaign is the content itself. A lot of industry knowledge and an in-depth understanding of what the customers want and what will create a measurable impact for them is required. Your marketing campaign needs to be engaging and prompt the viewers to action.

A marketing campaign is useful only when there is an understanding of customer interests, notice what your customers generally view, what causes they are interested in, and how do you want to use this information to generate your desired output.

Successful marketing campaigns function both online and offline. Direct mail can be used to build upon your social media efforts. Perhaps a cute handwritten postcard providing more information on the product can touch your customers and encourage them to act.

Personalization of your messages can go a long way into making lifelong customer bonds. Customers love when a company takes out time to recognize them and appreciate their loyalty.

Marketing campaigns are the most impactful when there is a call to action towards the end. If your customer base mostly consists of humanitarians, you could partner up with an NGO for community welfare causes to increase sales.

5.  Design Your Unique Mail Piece

Bold and vibrant posters and images are the fun part of every marketing campaign. Take your marketing game a step further by putting together a mail piece. Hand-addressed direct mail has a higher chance of being opened and read than any other form of letters. The best strategy to ensure that your mail gets opened and read is to employ a mail writing service like Think Ink.

Think ink is a premier provider of personalized handwritten mail solutions. Research has shown that highly targeted customers tend to respond to long and direct mail letters. Think ink has been in the direct mailing industry for 25 years and thus has much knowledge on what works and what doesn’t.

Think ink provides its clients with consultation services as well regarding the best marketing strategy they can use and the best writing style according to your business and your budget. The company can help you grow your customer base by helping you structure an effective and personalized marketing strategy by hand-addressed direct mail. Not only this, but the company also engages in hybrid online marketing. They have unique ideas like the newspaper tear sheet concept that has proven to help companies expand their customer base.

Other than letters, you can also convey your message via postcards, Catalogs, and Flats. The possibilities are endless!

6.  Choosing A Printer

For letters, printers are always a crucial step, no matter if the message is handwritten or not. The best practice is to know your order size beforehand and ask for bids from printers so that you can estimate the costs. It is not recommended to settle for just for the lowest price; instead, you should also look at the quality of print and the result.

Choosing the right printer is an essential step, pick a printer service that is good with deadlines. Professional printer services will provide you with a blue line. A blue line is a photographic print of negatives that show you how the final product will look so that you would know beforehand of any changes.

Think Ink’s printing partners provide you with a wide selection of styles and templates through which you can make distinctive and compelling marketing pieces that can connect you with your target audience. They offer different and unique features to personalize communications with your prospective customers.

7.  Posting Your Letter

There are many ways through which you can mail your marketing masterpieces to your target audience. Postal services offer low rates for bulk mails, but bulk mails are a hassle for companies and many companies and must conform to many conditions, which is usually not possible if your mailpiece is specifically designed to stand out and create an impact. Many companies opt for the more expensive single piece mailing because it is convenient, saves time, and the whole process isn’t cost-effective for them.

While posting your email, sorting the mail can get confusing. Many companies sell software which will presort your addresses and will figure out how many mail pieces will qualify for what price. In short, this software is designed to save your time and help you find out the most cost-efficient way to post your mail.

If you don’t want to go through the mailing hassle all by yourself, think ink Marketing will help you manage all the different aspects to mail and track your direct mail pieces. They have specialized software to track the USPS delivery process at every stage.

Think ink has two thousand writers dedicated to delivering your message to your customers!  Think ink routinely deals with bulk orders and are skilled at what they can do, which is excellent news for marketers because it ensures that their campaign reaches the right user at the right time with the right message.

8.  Don’t forget to do a Sample Test First!

As obvious as it sounds, marketing campaigns are expensive, and to prevent losses, it is better to do a small sample test first with a few loyal customers or a small percentage of your prospective customers. This strategy will help you get feedback so that you can fine-tune your campaign to your clientele.

You can carry out preliminary tests and establish your Key Performance Indicators before you entirely run the campaign. Testing will help give you direction on what you want to achieve and will help you perfect your campaign. By carefully planning your digital and direct mail efforts, you can reach your target consumers and expand your customer base!

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