Direct Mail Essentials.
Direct mail is one of the most powerful yet the least-used, and certainly least used effectively marketing strategies available to small business owners.
And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Companies providing direct mail services are out there and because it’s a competitive business, prices are reasonable, typically adding only a few tens of pence on top of the price of the stamp per item for a big mailing.
Although it’s a trade-off: what’s your time worth?
For small runs you might not (and probably don’t) want to pay for direct mail services: you can easily stuff and stamp 1000 envelopes in a couple of evenings, and for most small businesses, this is certainly a good sized mailing to be doing.
But, whether you choose to do it all in-house, or elect to use direct mail services vendors, to get it right and be successful (and that means make it profitable), you must stick to some fairly simple but very important fundamentals.
For a direct mail campaign to be successful you have to get three things exactly right.
- 1.
- You must select exactly the right direct mail list...
- 2.
- To send a compelling offer…
- 3.
- Presented in exactly the right way...
Get any one of these wrong, and you have a direct mail marketing disaster on your hands, which means it's going to pay you to attend closely to the subtleties you need to understand to make your direct mail fit these three criteria.
Select the right people
First, you’ve got to know whom you’re sending your direct mail marketing. It’s no good sending it to a random list of contacts, which, unfortunately, is the typical approach most business owners use. This is a “shotgun” approach to direct mail marketing and usually ends up losing the business a lot of money.
Why?
Because unless you’ve targeted the people correctly, you have no idea whether or not they are good prospects for your business.
Sounds simple and obvious, but in my experience the main reason that direct mail UK business owners send doesn’t do well is it’s sent to the wrong direct mail list.
So choose your direct mail list very carefully
Send a compelling offer
The second most important thing is what you’re offering to sell them.
Usually, a direct mail campaign contains boring, unimaginative letters which are rarely anything more sophisticated than a message saying “Hi, we give great service! Give us a call if we can help!”
This is not an offer, and it’s a waste of a good direct mail campaign.
You need to give your reader a genuine reason for responding to the offer, whether it’s to call on the phone, to drop into the shop, visit a web-page or whatever.
Just telling them to call “if we can help” will see your letter going straight into the bin.
We’re bombarded with (literally) thousands of marketing messages every day and with direct mail UK recipients, especially, it’s harder and harder to get a response. So it’s incumbent on you, if you want the responses, to make your offer as compelling as possible.
And present your offer in exactly the right way
If you listen to the hype trumpeted by professional copywriters, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were a race of superbeings with supernatural powers of mind-control.
They’re not. They’re just normal people like you and me. The only difference is they’ve studied the learnable skill of copywriting and use some simple devices and techniques in their copy to encourage people to buy.
And while we can rightly be cynical about the claims they sometimes make, there is no doubt how you write your copy matters: all things being equal good copy will outperform bad copy.
With direct mail UK readers are very wary and sceptical of the overblown style favoured in the US, where they’re more used to this kind of approach. It is a cultural thing, and something you need to be aware of if you’re learning your copywriting style from American books and resources.
The simple rule to remember is to write like you speak, and to display a friendly, personal and personable attitude to your readers. They don’t want to receive something reading like a summons to the High Court, or the formal kind of thing they get from their Solicitor.
It’ll serve you well to remember the time-honoured AIDA formula for writing persuasive and compelling copy: get their attention, pique their interest, arouse their desire and then, finally, get them to take action.
Have a look around the rest of this site and see some of the specific direct mail strategies you can use to increase your profits starting TODAY!
Happy Copywriting!
Chris Cardell
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