Monday, June 25, 2018

What is Direct Mail Marketing and How Can I Use It to Build My Business?


Direct mail marketing is a way for businesses to potentially attract new customers or to maintain a relationship with previous customers. So how exactly does this work for your business? It’s really as simple as it sounds. A company uses a mail service to deliver different promotional or informational material about their products or services directly to the target market. This includes materials such as brochures, newsletters, postcards, or catalogs. As you can see, if proper research is conducted to identify the right target market, direct mail marketing can prove to be very valuable when it comes to building your business.

How Direct Mail Marketing Can Build Your Business

In today’s world of technology, most businesses focus their time and efforts on social media marketing and other forms of online marketing strategies rather than even considering direct mail. So, direct mail marketing could potentially differentiate your business from fellow competitors if you execute it properly. However, if you’re a small business owner, it might seem costly to invest in direct mail marketing to reach your entire target market. Continue reading for some strategies and tips to keep in mind when you roll out a direct mail campaign.

Know your budget and target market

When it comes to direct mail marketing, so many businesses want to do a large mass mailing to everyone in their target market in hopes of getting responses. However, after just one mass mailing, it’s not very likely that a enough potential customers will respond in order to cover the massive amount of money you just spent. It’s important to spend more time researching your target market to send out a smaller number of direct mailings to hand-picked prospects instead of just to everyone. This will help you stay within your budget and should also give you a much higher success rate.

Have a clear objective for your mailing

This part is crucial. When a potential customer receives your promotional material and it is so congested with information that they can’t figure out what the purpose is, don’t expect them to take further action. Create direct mail that has a clear, defined objective that the prospect can easily identify and understand what they should do next to act upon it. This objective could be something like:

  • Announcing a new store location/hour
  • Get the customer to actually come visit the store
  • Promotion of a sale
  • Making a phone call
  • Going to a web page to take an action like signing up for notifications or becoming a member

Don’t stop at just one mailing

As much as you could spend time creating the best piece of marketing content to send out to customers, reality is that not every single one of them will take action and respond. So be prepared to have to send out multiple mailings to your customers. It may seem redundant at first, but the more the customers see your business’s name they will create name recognition for your business. This will make them familiar with your business and even have them consider your business in the future even though they don’t regularly respond to your direct marketing efforts.

Direct mail marketing isn’t a going to be an overnight success for every business. It does require time and effort to get customers to take action and respond to your efforts. However, with quality research of your target market and consistency with the mailings, you may find that direct mail is an extremely profitable marketing channel for your business.