Making Direct Mail Work
January 20, 2015   Dave Lewis

Sometimes “multi-channel” is just good mail

“Direct mail doesn’t work.” That’s what the guy from the paving company told me. It was tough to argue with him. I had his mail piece sitting on my desk. It was a nice looking piece – it was a full color card, with a picture of a cracked parking lot on one side, and some copy about what a good paving company his was - seemed reasonable to me. Oh and they are “the guys with the blue trucks.” I like blue. It even had a QR code. He sent out 5,000 of these cards a couple of times a year and only got three of four calls each time. It cost him a lot of money. Therefore, direct mail doesn’t work. Well, bad direct mail doesn’t work. Actually, given the cost of a paving project, 3 or 4 responses isn’t so bad, but I am confident he could have done a lot better with a few SnailWorks touches:
  • He needs an offer. Unless I was sitting at my desk worrying about my parking lot, there was no reason for me to respond to his card. No reason to keep it either, for when I do need a good, um, paver. There should have been a reason to respond – send me a free report on ten ways to make my parking lot better, or give me a free pavement analysis. Better still, give me a $20 restaurant gift card if I let him evaluate my pavement.
  • He needs a landing page. The only way I had to respond was to email to a generic “sales@” email address, or call them. I could go to their web site, I guess, but that didn’t help much. I’m not crazy about calling company numbers, and younger people really hate calling. If he had an offer, he could have created a landing page where interested folks could have gone to take advantage of it. http://PaveMyLotNow.com is available.
  • He needs links to that landing page. He had a QR code, which was a nice thought, but it just went to his home page. It was not responsive design, so even looking at it on a mobile device was difficult at best. And if you could see it, there was nothing there to see – just general information about the company. That QR code should go to a mobile version of his landing page, with that great offer we crafted for him. It’s digital print, so let’s go ahead and make the QR code personalized. A PURL would be nice too – not required, but sometimes very effective.
  • An email would be nice. If he has email addresses for any of his prospects he should definitely send an email just as the postcard arrives. It really just gives his prospects another avenue for response. Again, let’s link them to the landing page.
OK, that’s it. NOW let’s mail that sucker and see if direct mail works or not. We didn’t really change a lot – his production and postage costs are no higher. We just added an offer and a response channel. There is some cost to create the landing page, but it’s not a lot, and once this program works he can continue to use that page and absorb the cost across a number of campaigns. Of course he’ll also need to buy some restaurant gift cards every time his salespeople go on a sales call – a pretty safe investment I’m guessing. Best of all, he can know exactly how everything is working by checking his SnailWorks dashboard, and fine tune his campaigns to provide a continual stream of fresh leads month after month. We can even email the right lead directly to the sales person for each territory. There could be a few more blue trucks out there. This is how direct mail works, particularly for small to medium businesses. And done right, it DOES work.

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