Take These Three Steps Before Executing a Direct Mail Campaign

Direct mail campaigns can be costly for businesses, especially if companies fail to create a strategy for executing their direct mail campaigns. Fortunately, there are several things Twin Cities companies can do to decrease costs and increase the effectiveness of their direct mail campaigns.

First Step: Manage Your List

A company’s list of advertising recipients is essential to the success of a direct mail campaign. A well-maintained list will include only recipients who are interested in the company’s product and are able to convert from potential to paying customers. Recipients who may have moved and are no longer at the address listed on a company’s list, or a recipient may have requested to not receive mail from the company should be removed from the list.

To weed out recipients who do not meet these criteria, companies should delete the following types of people from their lists:

· People for whom companies receive “return to sender” mail

· People for whom companies receive “not at this address” mail

· People for whom companies receive stop mail requests

Second Step: Test the Direct Mail Campaign

Testing a direct mail campaign allows companies to tweak their messages so the mail pieces target recipients more effectively. There are several ways to test a direct mail campaign. The simplest is to show mock-ups of a direct mail piece to current and potential customers and ask them to evaluate the message and calls-to-action. Positive responses can give companies the confidence they need to go to press with the campaign.

Other ways to test a direct mail campaign is to send pieces to a small, pre-selected target market and tract responses, or send multiple versions of a campaign to recipients and see which one has the most positive outcome. Companies can use this data to tweak its message and roll out the campaign on a larger scale.

Third Step: Print Direct Mail Digitally

Whether companies are implementing a full direct mail campaign or are testing a campaign on a small audience, digital printing with Matreks is an economical way to print high-quality mail pieces. In digital printing, each piece is an original copy of a digital file. This means companies can change the lay-out or message of their direct mail piece mid-run or print several different versions of a direct mail piece in one run. Digital printing is cost-effective for short and long-run projects alike.

To learn more about how digital printing can lower costs of your company’s direct mail campaign, contact Matreks today at 952-746-4010.