Making Direct Mail Work

• Choosing the right mailing list
• Getting the content of the mailing pack right
• Mailing out at the right time in the right way

• Testing
• Dates

Quite obviously you could have a really great letter and brochure but bring in a poor response rate because something is wrong with the physical aspect of the mailing.   This could be to do with the mailing being wrong in its “look and feel”, because the mailing list was not as good as you thought it was, or because it was mailed out at the wrong time.

The issue of when to mail is dealt with separately under “dates” – the other issues are looked at briefly below.

If you are handling the mailing yourself it is always important to look at as much direct mail as possible that is going to your target market.  Never assume that you know what people in your market receive – you really must take a look and ensure that you are delivering materials that either have the same look and feel as that which people normally get – or that you are making bold steps away from the norm for clearly argued and clearly researched reasons.

Let me give one “look and feel” example.  Almost all direct mail is marked with a postage paid impression (PPI) or frank mark.  Virtually none of it is posted with a stamp.  Now there are some articles on the internet which suggest that by putting a stamp on a letter can get more people to open it, and you might go along with that.  However this change to a stamp, radically changes the look and feel of the envelope.

The effect is generally the reverse of what you might think.  With business mail a stamp makes the sender look small scale – a cottage industry where the owners of the business painfully handle every item themselves.  That’s ok if that is the image reflected in your text – but if you are claiming to be a market leader, or you are stressing that every year more and more people turn to your business, the whole package does not hold together.

With consumer mail a stamp (and indeed a hand written envelope) will take the opening rate up to 100%.  But then something else happens.  The recipient has opened the mail believing it to be a personal letter.   But then he/she finds it is nothing of the kind – it is an advert.  Even if the advert is to a carefully selected group of people who will be interested it is still an advert.   So the recipient feels cheated, and does not go further.  Response rates can sink from 2% to 0%.

In terms of the mailing list – be wary of using out-of-date lists, or lists that you find on the internet or which are given away just because you have advertised in a directory.   Of course some of these might be ok, but the general rule is, if the list is old, or is cheap, it is not very good.  The reason people pay lots of money for lists is that getting the right list really can make a huge difference to a mailing.  Indeed the cost benefit of a free mailing list against one charged at £70 per thousand would be totally wiped out if the paid for list is just 5% more accurate than the free list.  The point being that you are not just paying for the list – you are also paying for the mailing.  So every time you send out a wrongly addressed letter it doesn’t cost you nothing – it costs you the cost of putting that item in the post (usually 50p in most mailings).

Testing

Testing is fundamental to direct mail.  There really is no need to go out and mail 20,000 addresses first time around, when you could be mailing just a few hundred to see how it goes.

The rule of how many to test is derived from the percentage of replies you expect to get.  So if you are looking for a 1% response rate, you might mail out 500 in order to check you get 5 replies.  If you get 4 you are close, and the margin of error suggests you might on a larger mailing get 3 out of 100 or 5 out of 100.  If 5 per 100 is an utter minimum, you might want to test again.

If you are looking to get 2% then a mailing of 250 will this time get you 5 replies if all is running ok.  On the other hand, if you are happy with 1 sale per 1000 items mailed out, you really should mail 2000 as an absolute minimum in your test – and even if you get your 2 sales, it would be wise to repeat the experiment just to be sure.

All tests should be random.   If you are selling across the UK, don’t test on certain counties, select at random from the entire kingdom.  If you are selling to Norfolk only, of course just mail Norfolk, but again test from the whole county.

Some people argue that they can’t test because “this is our selling season – if I don’t mail now I won’t get sales, so I don’t have time to test.”   That is fair enough for this year – but what you really should do if this applies to you is to try several alternative approaches within your major mailing, so you have information for next year.  So, out of your mailing to 10,000 addresses, 9,000 might go with the tried and tested formula, 500 with variation A and 500 with variation B.   If the main mailing gets 2%, variation A gets 1% and variation B gets 3%, then you have a clear indication that you ought to change your approach next year.

Dates

Every industry has times when it is good to mail, and times when not.  Furthermore, the way in which you sell changes through the year.  You sell summer holidays in January as something to look forward to.  By July you sell them as “last minute bookings”.

In order to get in at the right time you need to appreciate the flow of order processing among the people you are mailing.  Many firms, for example, are amazed how much impact they can make in mailing schools in June – just before the term ends.  I won’t explore the reasons here, but there are several reasons why this is such a good time – but only those who investigate the industry would know.

However, extraneous events can affect response rates.  Among the most well documented are:

• the death of a very famous person (much of the mail that hit between Princess Diana’s death and her funeral had low response rates)
• times of national uncertainty (around the time of financial crashes or general elections where it is believed that a change of government would have a profound impact on the economic well-being of the country)
• when there are postal strikes (mail gets bunched and delayed when there are short term disruptions, so people get no mail one day then a lot the next)
• at times of very bad weather (mail is delayed, people don’t go to work, people don’t post orders), at times of very hot weather (no one feels like doing anything)
• or at times of major sporting events (God help the direct mail industry if the England football team ever actually manage to win something).

You can work around some of these matters, but not all.  If something happens just as your well planned mailshot hits, there is little you can do.  Which is why the best campaigns run over longer periods of time in order to avoid any such oddities.