Direct Mail

For some businesses and for some purposes direct mail may be a good thing to do. Direct mail as marketers call it is known as "junk mail" by its recipients. The only way that direct mail is effective is by reaching large numbers of people. The reason for this is that when you arrive home and check your mailbox you sort the mail as quickly as you can because you have other things to do. So you put aside the bills and throw away the junk. Something has to stand out in order to get your attention. Even when a postcard stands out with great colors or some attention getting headline we hope to get only a quarter of a percent response. This means that if we mail out 10,000 postcards then we hope to get 25 people to take a look at them and call our client. You may have heard people say that a one percent response rate is normal but at our advertising agency we like to be realistic and say that one percent would be a very good response rate.

The postcard above has a compelling offer and since people generally sign up for alarm service monitoring for years at a time a small rate of return would work well for this client. Each new alarm system monitoring client is worth hundreds of dollars.

For a dermatologist who offers Botox and Laser treatments direct mailing to women in affluent areas of town will be effective. 

The point to all forms of advertising is that you must make enough sales to cover the cost of the advertising and still come out with a profit.  We see companies like Coke and Pepsi spend millions of dollars in TV advertising only to sell an inexpensive can of soda.  This works because we don't buy one can of soda in our lives.  Each one of us (who drinks soda) is worth thousands of dollars over our lifetime.

Dermatology advertising will be worth the cost because the services a dermatologist provides can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars.

We sent out 20,000 postcards for this restaurant.  The restaurant reported back to us that they had an amazing two percent rate of response.  This was easy for them to track because people had to bring in the postcard in order to get their discount. Since the restaurant is more of a high end steak and seafood restaurant we obtained a mailing list of the most expensive homes within a given distance around the restaurant.  We also added one unique feature to this postcard design.  We were able to apply yellow sticky notes with a personalized note using the addressees name.  The note used blue ink and a font that resembled handwriting and said, "YourName, try Carlton's Restaurant & Lounge tonight!".   That sticky note got the attention of the homeowner but without the great $30 discount that was offered the postcard wouldn't have worked as well.  So we need a good design, a good offer, the right mailing list and then we have a chance of getting better than average results.

We asked our client who his best clients would be and then created a mailing list of those prospects. The client owns a franchise which refills ink cartridges. The owner told us insurance companies and law firms use a lot of ink and would be great clients. We mailed the postcard out to those two client types within a certain area around his location. The postcards went out around the new year and we also created a new year's related movie theater advertising campaign for him.

Since this postcard is far from the ordinary mail that would arrive at an insurance office or lawyer's office we expected to get their attention and we did.

We designed this postcard for a company that sets up staging and lighting for conventions and events.  Direct mailing these works for this client because we are able to buy lists of meeting planners and they would use the services of our client.  When a large corporation sends all of their employees to a hotel and convention center they are investing a lot of money to make this event come out great.  The staging and lighting will be worth thousands of dollars to my client so a very small rate of return on the postcards will be hugely profitable.

The examples shown above show when direct mail can be effective. This doesn't mean that direct mail is right for every business. For some business types the cost of acquisition of a new client must be kept extremely low because of the low number of people who may need the product or service or the low cost of the product or service.

If this is the case with your business advertising needs then a different form of mailing might work for you. We are able to aggregate many advertisers together and send out one mailing which contains each of their ads. By doing this we share the biggest part of the expense, the postage. When we use a shared mailing program everyone wins because one flat fee will cover the postage and many clients can have their offer included in the mailing. This is NOT an envelope that contains one coupon from each client although those can be effective as well. With a shared mailing only one piece gets addressed and the letter carrier delivers all the pieces which go along with the addressed card or folder. Most people never notice that the pieces are not addressed so it looks like any other mail.

Shared mail programms are not available in all areas but in many large cities we are able to aggragate mailings of multiple advertisers and save our clients a lot of money.  In general we can do a shared mailing to 100,000 homes for less money than the cost of just the postage to only 10,000 homes.

Today there are some new, lower priced direct mail marketing options that we never had before. We now have the ability to reach every mail box within an area for a fraction of the cost of only a direct mail marketing program of the past. You may well wonder how it is possible to have lower costs when the US Post Office is raising rates. The cost savings comes in the form of new direct mail marketing programs offered by the US Post Office which allow mailings at a fraction of the cost of a regular postage stamp.

Maybe direct mail will work for your business or maybe it is not the best option. Here is the point. Recently someone called our office and asked about placing a newspaper ad. We don't place newspaper ads just because someone asks us to place newspaper advertisements for them. Most newspaper readers are age 50 and above and highly educated. I asked the caller if that sounded like her typical client. Her clients tend to be women around age 30-35 so newspaper advertising would have been a waste of her money. Depending upon the specific type of business maybe we would suggest that they begin looking at trade show displays and consider local, regional or national trade shows. We look at a client's advertising budget and come up with a plan based upon their budget.

This is the reason it is always best to work with an ad agency.