5 Questions to Improve Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail can be a very rewarding business-generation tool, but it has to be done right. There are things marketing directors should consider before championing a direct response campaign in their organizations. If marketing leaders would ask themselves the following five questions, their meetings with digital printing and mail house partners can be more effective—and mail campaigns more fruitful:

1. What is the plan?

Simply starting is often the hardest part, but having a documented plan allows you to begin changing and modifying the plan. The way I learn, is often characterized by behaviorists as “visual spatial” learning; I need to draw things out to understand them. I like using a dry-erase board or a software solution, such as Microsoft Visio, to map out the anatomy of my plan and know where I’m going and what my next steps should be.

2. Where am I going to get my data?

There is no better place to start a direct mail strategy than to leverage data that you already have. However, most companies have difficulty implementing an effective customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Your team must be disciplined in recording and cleansing this data or you are going to have to purchase it from an outside source. (In reality, most companies do a little of both.) A disadvantage is that it often requires a lot of clean-up effort both internally and externally—an expense that you need to plan for. Purchasing data is good for finding new customers, but you have to know what your current customers look like before you can go and find more. Purchased data is usually clean and is ready for most postal requirements, but costs of the data, and performing any data modeling, need to be considered.

3. Who is going to design the mail piece?