So, you’ve identified a new market that you believe is going to want your product and/or service.
Direct mail is a marketing tool you can use to gauge if a market will reply to your call-to-action at a reasonable cost, and gain those valuable new sales leads. Direct mail provides your business the ability to target a defined market with customized offers. A database is needed. It can be a custom database that you create or acquire. It can also be a purchased list.
Direct mail has many attractive advantages:
- Cost: You can customize your campaign to your available budget.
- Targeting: Precise targeting of recipients.
- Control: Ability to control the response levels that you are prepared to handle. For example, if you run a magazine ad, you don’t know if you will get 5 or 5,000 responses. Your reaction to these newly acquired sales leads could likely damage your customer relationship if you aren’t prepared. You can control the mailing size and frequency to make sure you can handle the response.
- Speed: Direct mail can be a fast-turnaround marketing tool.
- Data: You can test different call-to-actions to see which have better response rates.
- Frequency: You can mail to the same list with different messages.
- Unlimited Prospects: You can constantly expand into various targets. Look for new niche direct mail markets for your product/service. AmeriPrint can suggest possible target markets.
Once you distribute your mail campaign, you should also follow up with additional sales materials, phone calls, email, etc. to help convert this sales lead into a sales prospect, ultimately into a loyal customer.
The process is the same no matter if it is a small or large budget campaign:
- Get your mailing list
- Design and print your mail piece(s) such as a postcard, letter, return envelope, flyer, etc.
- Create and apply a tracking mechanism such as mailing batch codes
- Test your mail campaign
- Apply postage and mail out the campaign
- Respond to sales leads
- TRACK & ANALYZE YOUR RESULTS