4 Surefire Ways to Make Sure Your Direct Mail Ends Up in the Trash
You’ve spent weeks carefully crafting your mailer – it represents a great deal of time, effort, and money. So the worst possible scenario is that it goes directly from the mailbox to the trashcan without even a second glance. There is no avoiding this for some portion of any direct mail campaign. But if you want ensure such a disaster, just follow these four simple steps:
- Address to “occupant” – or some other generic term, like our personal favorite, “valued customer.” You are absolutely not making anyone feel valued by using that term instead of their name. There is simply no excuse for this: you should already be using a good direct mail list, whether rented, compiled or purchased from reliable sources, so you should be able to at the very least guess at a name.
- Use bad demographic targeting. Some products have a very wide appeal, such as a new restaurant opening in the area. Occasionally, however, poor demographic marketing can waste your money, or even offend your customer! For example, I received an invitation to join AARP just days before my 24th birthday. Every detail on the mailer was correct – my name, address, etc. – but I was more than 40 years away from retirement. Make sure you can utilize data like age, so you don’t waste your money like that.
- Don’t have a clear call to action. Managing to get past the first glance is an important step. Perhaps you’ve even intrigued a customer. There are still ample opportunities to end up in the trash can: particularly when the customer doesn’t understand what they’re supposed to do with the information provided. Do they need to call? Send an email? Visit a website? What’s their next step? Whether it’s hard to find or understand on the mailer, or simply not very good, mishandling the call to action changes someone interested in your mailer into someone who considers it clutter.
- Don’t bother following up. Sending one piece of direct mail is only part of the process. It is crucial to follow up with a phone call or another mail piece. It’s been proven time and time again, great marketing takes multiple touches before you make an impression in the mind of your customer. Even if your first card winds up in the dreaded dustbin, your second is more likely to be looked at and considered. It takes time and patience.
We are seasoned pros at avoiding these traps! Contact us today to get started enhancing your marketing strategies.