How to Increase the Response to Your Next Direct Mail Campaign - By: Robert Johnston,

Direct mail can be great for your marketing plan because it is relatively cheap, compared with television advertising and billboards, but the down side is the low response rate. A 1 to 2% response rate means you need to send out a lot of mail.

Direct mail is helpful because it can help you track your sales, by either using differing coupon codes per region or Zip code, or by color coding your direct mail pieces. But there are ways you can improve your response rate without breaking the bank.

Evaluate these factors to find out how you can improve your response rate to your next direct mail campaign:

Campaign Goal
Do you have a clear goal for what you want your direct mail campaign to achieve? Are you trying to generate leads? Do you want to drive traffic to your store or Web site? By knowing your goal, you can write more effective copy and use more effective graphics.

Once you’ve chosen a clear goal, establish a baseline and track responses against that baseline. For example, to see if your direct mail is helping drive traffic to your Web site, note how many hits you get per day before you send out the direct mail pieces, and then track how many hits you get after sending out direct mail pieces. You can easily track your success through this tracking process.

Your Mailing List
Identify the best customers on your mailing list and then try to add new people to your mailing list that match the characteristics of your best customers. You can build a more targeted mailing list that will generate more responses because you know who is most likely to respond and you’re targeting those exact people.

Your Offer
Whatever your offer is - a coupon, an informational Web seminar, a gift for visiting a trade show booth - focus on selling the benefits of responding and receiving the offer. Make it sound like you are doing the consumer a favor.

Your Direct Mail Piece
This is the part where testing your direct mail campaign before launching it will help you most. You need to design an attractive mail piece that will grab people’s attention and urge them to respond. You also need to test which type of mail piece is most attractive to your target market. If people respond more to postcards than flyers, you need to up your postcard printing budget and send out more postcards. This also means you can scale back your flyer printing budget and other print budgets for items that aren’t working well, which means you’ll get more return on your investment (ROI). You won’t waste money by printing pieces that people aren’t likely to respond to.

Campaign Cost
To figure your campaign cost, take the total cost of your mailing (including design, printing, postage, and labor) and divide that number by the revenue generated from an average sale. This number is how many sales you need to cover the cost of your mailing. Anything more is profit. For example, if your mailing campaign cost is $1,000 and your average order is $100, you’ll need to make 10 sales to cover the $1,000 cost (10 x 100 = 1000). This can help you put your direct mail cost into perspective. Ten sales worth of marketing isn’t too bad!

Evaluate these five factors and see how you can tweak them to be more effective to garner more responses to your direct mail campaign. By altering any one of these, you’re more likely to see bigger responses than any direct mail campaign in the past.

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