Making Direct Mail Work

 
 
  
 
 
 
 
  

First time

It went poorly: change list

You need to be sure that your list is ok - and one way to do this is to check the number of "gone aways" you got.  If you put your return address on an envelope and the mailing address is wrong Royal Mail will return your envelope to you.

If your gone away total is greater than 2% you should be asking for compensation from your list supplier, and if it is over 4% you should begin to wonder about the validity of the list.

You also need to check the age of the list - if it is more than one year old it could be seriously hampering your efforts.

There is often a temptation to use a mailing list which is low in cost - or even free.  For example, many such lists can be downloaded from the internet or can be obtained from a friend of a friend.

The problem with such lists is that even if just 5% of the addresses are wrong they can affect your response rate and turn what could have been a profitable sale into a failure.

Apart from the age of the list, consider the content of the list.  For example, you might be mailing accountants, and you might have a perfectly fine list of accountants.   But the response rate may be poor.  What you could find is that you are selling to some accountants and not others, and that a careful analysis could lead you to the understanding that you sell very well to accountants with (say) over 20 staff, but poorly to smaller firms.   Thus you could find that you see these results:

  • Total response required for a good profit: 2%
  • Actual response rate on total list: 0.5%
  • Response rate when just considering firms with over 20 staff: 4%.

This is good news, but there is even better news to come.   There's no need to write off all the smaller firms that are not buying your material.  If you feel that they should be buying from you, and that your product is ideally suited for them, what this suggests is that you need a different type of mailshot for these smaller firms.   You may well be able to raise the response rate from the smaller firms if you write to them in a different way - but you will never know that this is the issue until you analyse your database.

There is more on database analysis on another of our websites: Cutting the cost in half using the Filtered Database Technique

 

 

 

 

 
 
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