Direct mail is an important part of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers for small businesses. Do you use direct mail campaigns? Look at the following steps to start and improve your efforts in direct mailing.
The success of direct mail campaigns depends on your entrepreneurial creativity, testing, and refining all the parts of your campaign instead of waiting for success with the same campaigns.
Even in todays way of living our lives, we can still use direct mail to get, keep, and grow our customer base for our small business.
Here, I want to cover 12 different steps that will help you in your efforts to optimize your direct mail campaign and increase the return on investments as obtaining more customers, more revenue and more profitability for your business.
1. Analyse successful direct mail campaigns
You need to start with something for a better ideation process. Why do you not start with already successful direct mail campaigns in the industry where your business operates?
Find several different direct mails and analyze them by asking the following questions:
- What does the company try to achieve?
- How do they design their direct mail campaigns?
- What’s the target market?
- What’s the offer?
- How do they use the call to action?
- What is the recipient’s value in the campaigns?
- What are the options for recipients?
2. Decide about your target direct mail list
The next step, and maybe one of the most important steps in this process, is your target list.
Who will be the recipients of your direct mail campaign?
If you invest more time in finding your most important direct mail list, your success will be much higher. That means you will have a higher conversion rate, more customers, more income, and more profitability for your business.
Think about your ideal target customers. Where can you find their details? Are they the persons who want to receive something from you?
3. Research your target audience for your direct mail
Now, the logical next step is to start with the research process before you start with the design of your direct mail campaign.
Answer the following questions:
- What do they want to hear from you?
- What do they want to receive from you?
- What are the next steps that you will want them to take?
- What’s the best approach to come to them?
4. Prepare your best offer that can’t be refused
Next, continue with your best offer. Find something that you can offer them but they can’t refuse it.
The better offer you prepare, the better results you will receive.
5. Don’t forget about personalization to build a trust
You already have your direct mail list, and you have your offer. Now, think about personalization of your direct mail campaign.
Personalizations are important because they will build trust in your company.
6. Prepare several campaigns
Now, you can start with the content of your campaign. What will you include as content?
But, instead of starting with the assumptions, it is better to prepare several different campaigns that you will test in the next step.
The biggest question is what you can test. You can simply test the content of your offer, different calls to action, and different approaches in the general part of your content…
7. Test your direct mail campaigns on 10% of your list
When you have prepared several different direct mail campaigns, you can start with the tests. Simply start sending your different direct mail to 10% of your targeted list that you have built in the second step.
The purpose of this test is to find the best converting offer, call to action, and different parts of the content on your direct mail.
8. Implement what you have discovered in the test
Now, if you already know what the best combination from your earlier tested campaigns is, you can mix them into one new official campaign that will be sent to the rest of the people on your target list.
9. Launch your direct mail campaign
In this step, you simply launch your campaign officially.
10. Analyze the results
Launching the campaign didn’t mean the end of the whole process. If you want to succeed in direct mail campaigns, you will need continually to iterate your way to success. You need to analyze the results and make changes to improve the content for the next campaigns.
11. Don’t forget to continually build your direct mail list
One of your tasks will be to continually work on building your direct mail list. Don’t forget about this task.
12. Repeat all previous steps
For the next campaign, you can simply repeat all previous steps. Don’t skip some of them because you simply want to improve all aspects of your direct mail campaign.
