3 Things Wrong with Direct Mail…
October 9, 2014   Karen Bartram

...that you can absolutely fix.

I hate “3 Things” articles that blab, blab, blab for four paragraphs before they get into the list, so let’s get right to it: 1.  It requires effort to respond. This may be the biggest problem with direct mail – you can reach just the right person with just the right offer, but they still need to do something outside of that mail piece to respond, whether it’s go online to a web site, call an 800 number, write a check – they need to do something. And you can lose the sale right there. The piece gets set on the kitchen counter, buried on a desk, goes wherever mail pieces go, and that positive response you got never quite lands. 2.  You don’t know when it got delivered. It often takes multiple touches to make a sale. Any sales person knows this. So coordinating another touch – email, telemarketing, even another mail piece – is almost impossible when you have no idea when the mail got delivered, and on Standard Class Mail, delivery can take a day or a month. If you don’t know, you can coordinate. 3.  It’s expensive. Sorry, but it’s just true. No matter how hard you pound down your vendors, the cost per impression for direct mail is high. The Postal Service won’t negotiate much on postage, and, at minimum, you need to pay someone to print and mail it, and probably for a list. Best case you’re spending 30 – 40 cents a piece, maybe a lot more. OK, OK, OK! Calm down! I know direct mail is swell, and I love it. We can talk about all of its strengths in another post. We still need to deal with these weaknesses, and that is my objective here. And, more to the point, overcoming them. This is really the “why” of multi-channel - using other marketing channels to overcome the weaknesses of one channel. Because direct mail requires effort to respond, you need to give your prospect as many easy response channels as possible. Our favorite is sending an email timed to arrive the same day and reinforce the marketing message – AND give them a response option that they just need to click. That’s the great thing about email coordinated with direct mail – they can’t click on your mail piece, but they can click on the coordinated email. Because the delivery of direct mail is unpredictable, you need to track it, and use the delivery as a triggering event for another marketing effort. It’s easy to track mail these days with Intelligent Mail. Frankly, I’m mystified why anyone isn’t. Because direct mail is expensive you need to get every bit of value from it. Never send a piece if direct mail without envisioning an entire campaign around it. What is the offer? Why will someone respond to it? How will you follow it up? We never send a mailing out without following it with a series of emails. If we can generate some interest with the mail piece, we can almost always squeeze a few more responses out of it with follow-up emails. So I love direct mail, and you should too, but know its weaknesses and use other channels to overcome them. You’ll learn to love it even more!

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