Targeted Direct Mail Marketing

If you are in our specific target market, you know we love direct mail marketing as much as we love email marketing.

And to complete our Marketing Trifecta, website marketing and online advertising is an important component because you need more ways to bring customers in through the front door.

But we especially love targeted direct mail that earns our customer’s attention. And nothing is more powerful than a well-developed direct mail campaign.

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What is direct mail marketing?
Direct mail is a subset of marketing called direct marketing. Direct marketing is a form of marketing that communicates directly with the consumer. Direct mail communicates directly with the consumer by sending them promotions or other communications through the mail, such as USPS, UPS, DHS or Fedex.

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After all, it’s just you delivering your message - faithfully delivered by the time-tested mail carriers.

When properly developed…

Direct mail can be the ultimate marketing strategy

And when combined with our Marketing Trifecta, no competitor is going to be able to compete with you.

In fact, direct mail was the source for the original data driven marketing methodology that was so wonderfully outlined in Claude Hopkins' awesome book written in 1923, Scientific Advertising -- while the 21 principles are still solid today, Your Strategic Marketing Partner makes the marketing and advertising strategies modern, to help you to gain a customer and keep a customer!

In business, nothing else matters.

Not the shipping bay. Not the accounting software. Not the executive table, nor the break room. Just customers through marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost.

Marketing, as defined as ‘gaining a customer and keeping a customer’ are your chief objectives in business. And that is why Your Strategic Marketing Partner exists.

Onward.

Create direct mail that engages your BEST customers

When given the task to “do direct mail”, most freshly educated marketers with little-to-no ‘real world’ experience immediately come up with a $0.35 postcard mailing. Their first call is to a graphic designer to make it look glossy, colorful and pretty -- which has zero correlation to producing a marketing piece that makes a sale … but more about this important topic in later tutorials.

Direct mail only gets a 2% response?

Most newbie marketers learned in school that ‘direct mail only gains a 2% response,’ so why spend the money?

You’d probably throw away 98% of these postcard mailers, too.

But it’s virtually guaranteed that you will open the fed-ex package, the lumpy, entertaining envelope that is hand addressed to you or the see-through envelope that has money in it.

And when you make a great offer to your best customers that know you, trust you, and already have the habit of buying from you, you will thrive.

With the right direct mail campaigns, returns of 10%, 25% or far more are highly possible. Probable even.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

But before we get into an example campaign that you can do right now that can get monstrous returns like this, let’s review a couple direct mail basics and some definitions that will serve you and how you communicate with vendors and marketing directors.

The perfect beginning for your Direct Mail campaign starts with mailing addresses

Customers' addresses tell much about them.

Lifestyles - and buying habits - are often correlated with neighborhoods. So we will start by defining the best neighborhoods for your business.

Target marketing: Focus on people in your neighborhood that
want and can afford your services

We will start by concentrating efforts on one or a few key market segments as this can help you get the most from your initial test before rolling out larger.

The success or failure of any direct mail campaign, let alone any marketing campaign is based up these three factors:

1. The list -- who are you sending it to
2. The copy -- what are you saying and how is it delivered?
3. The offer -- what are you asking the reader to do, and what’s in it for them?

By far the most important part of this recipe is the list. So that is where most of our discussion is focused.

You could send a bad offer communicated poorly to a great list and see some positive results.

But the inverse is not true. You could send a great offer, written by the best copywriter on the planet, to a terrible list, and you have virtually zero chance of success.

Focus your direct mail marketing on the list

There are two main methods used to segment (target) a direct market list (we also do this in email marketing):

1. Geographical segmentation - Specializing in serving the needs of customers in a particular geographical area. For example, a donut shop may send advertisements only to people living within one-half mile of the store.
2. Customer segmentation - Identifying those people most likely to buy your product or service and targeting those groups.

The first place to start is to call Your Strategic Marketing Partner and tell us what you want to do.  We have team members who specialize in list segmentation, target marketing and direct mail.  Here are types of lists that target specific customers:

1. List A -- The counts of households that earn at least $100,000 a year or more in a 1-mile radius from your business address.  You may be looking for about 3,000-5,000 names and addresses. If there are not 3,000-5,000 people, choose a larger radius, start with 2 miles and expand, if needed.  This will be your core marketplace to target.
2. List B -- Get the counts of households that earn $200,000 or more within 1 mile. Depending upon your area, this will not be a huge list, but important as you might want to start marketing to this list immediately.
3. If it is in your budget, many companies will order list A in an excel spreadsheet so they can begin canvassing the desired neighborhoods with direct mail postcards, door hangers and future marketing campaigns.
4. When List B is ordered in an excel spreadsheet, the company can begin direct mail marketing and door hangers according to the marketing plan and calendar.

Now for the advanced direct mail campaign that you need to develop immediately

If you did no other direct mail campaign than this, you would see massive results.

In fact, you’d be light years ahead of your competitors and your customers will love you for this, when well done.

But for this to work, you need to write good sales copy, have a great offer, put in careful tracking mechanisms, and provide excellent service to your customers.

With that, here’s what you’ll need to do.

First, we are going to segment your house list.

1. Carve out the top 5% of your customers that have spent the most money.
2. If you have 10,000 customers, carving out the top 5% out leaves us with 500 of the most awesome customers in your list – the ultimate in customer segmentation.

If you don’t have a plan for this ‘creme of the crop’, you are leaving huge sums of sales revenue and customer goodwill for your competition to scoop up.

Do you think you could come up with an amazing high value offer that you could send to these top 500 customers?

Of course you could.

Here’s your plan. And let’s get you a 50%, 80% or even 100% open rate using highly targeted direct mail.

The plan:

1. Do a small test on 20% of your list. If your list is 500, let’s go with 100, measure your success and work out the bugs. Or you could just mail all 500.
2. Get 100 bags of high end candy as cheaply as you find them at the 99 cent store, Walmart or other bargain retailer.
3. Write a compelling, personalized salesletter with a headline such as this:“Bob, here’s the sweetest deal we have ever made -- reserved for our best customers”
4. Reference the bag of candy in the letter.
5. Make a great offer to this ‘creme of the crop’ list of customers. Be sure it's a very high value offer that your customers want and that you make a great gross profit on. (A service, a product bundle, a hybrid, membership, product of the month club, etc)
6. Send this priority mail, fedex, ups or at least with a tracking number.
7. The day you mail, send each customer a brief personal email with the tracking number so they can expect it in the mail.
8. For best results: follow up with a phone call 2-3 days after they get the package.
9. Track your results: 1) # of responses, 2) total cost, 3) total sales, 4) total revenue.
10. Have fun!

With this one campaign alone you can easily realize up to a 100% direct mail open rate and multiples on ad spend of 2x, 5x, even 10x!

We’ll review more about these awesome return case studies in other tutorials.

This direct mail campaign will absolutely open you up to endless possibilities.

And if you need assistance along the way, we are happy to help!