Direct Mail Companies

If you are considering a direct mail campaign, it is tempting to try to outsource everything to a direct mail company.  Direct mail companies can help you coordinate buying a mailing list, designing and printing your mailer, and

actually getting everything mailed out – using their bulk rate postage meter and the like.

If you are doing a huge (thousands of pieces) mailer, this could actually be a very smart and efficient way to do business.  I have had good success doing mailings with the support of direct mail companies when I didn’t have any other good starting place, such as a list of existing customers to work with.

The tough thing, though, about doing a bulk mailing with an untested mail piece to an untested list, is that it’s hard to get much feedback on whether the mailer had an impact.

Standard response rates in the direct mail industry are .5%-1% – pretty abysmal if you’re a small business owner.

You can drive your response rates up by increasing the number of times you send mail to the same list and by calling the people you have mailed to, in order to follow up.

However – be sure you do your homework.  Mailing list brokers may charge you more for mailing to the list multiple times (you “rent” the name with a certain number of times you are “allowed” to mail to them) and you get a discount if you mail to more names.

However, in my experience, mailings are more effective when they are smaller and more tightly targeted.

For example, rather than doing a mass mailing to 1,000 prospects, you could mail something personalized to them and call to follow up.

In the commercial real estate industry, I would mail a flyer to 100 property owners in a certain neighborhood, “Queen Anne Apartment Owners Newsletter” for example, and then call to follow up.  After I had hit the 300 or so folks in that neighborhood, I would change the headline on my mailing to say “Capitol Hill Apartment Owners Newsletter” and mail out to the next group of people.

Handing your direct mailings in this way increases your odds in a couple of ways.

Tips For Direct Mailing If You Can’t Afford To (Or Don’t Want To) Work With Direct Mail Companies

1. You can make it a warm call “Hi, I sent you a newsletter and was calling to follow up and see if you had any questions about the recent developments I mentioned.”
2. You can target the mailing more accurately.  A newsletter that is clearly for people who own apartments of 5-20 units in the Queen Anne/Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle is more likely to get read than a newsletter for anyone in Seattle that owns rental houses, shopping centers, apartment owners, or house boats.  This is a great thing for realtors to remember, but the idea can be applied to any niche.
3. You can spread out the cost of the mailing over weeks instead of having to bear the cost all upfront.
4. You can test offers more easily – if you find that no one is responding to your Call To Action, you can change it half way through, rather than sticking with a lame-duck mailing that just isn’t pulling like you thought it would.
5. If you make your own mailing list, by doing research and assembling it yourself, you can mail to it an unlimited number of times.

Direct mail companies definitely have their place, but don’t under estimate the effectiveness of a do-it-yourself mailing if your a business owner just getting started with the direct mail world.

Proven Marketing Campaigns