Direct Mail Marketing: 30 Reasons It Works

What's the most cost-effective, personal and direct way there is to attract new customers to your business, stimulate repeat business from your existing customers, and generate sales from past customers? Direct mail marketing. Here are 30 ways to use this time-tested medium to your advantage.

1. Get personal

Direct mail is the only truly personal medium, one person talking to another. Unlike general advertising, which aims to reach the masses, your sales letter arrives in your prospect's mailbox as a piece of personal communication from your mind to his.

2. Save money

Advertising by its very nature is expensive. To reach a lot of people, you need to spend a lot of money. Direct mail, on the other hand, only targets the prospects you want to reach. Instead of pitching your product to a huge audience of potential buyers, you aim your sales message only at prospects most likely to buy.

3. Break through the clutter

Your ad can easily get lost among dozens of competing ads in a trade newspaper. Your sales message is also easily forgotten on radio or television unless you repeat it many times, which is expensive. But a simple letter, addressed to your prospect by name and arriving on her desk in the morning mail (which she must open), cuts through the media clutter and gets her attention.

4. Speak to prospect's by name

Direct mail is also unique in that, unlike any other medium, it can be personalized (Dear Mrs. Smith) and customized to each reader ("As the owner of your own home, you know that..."), showing your prospects that you know them by name and know their needs.

5. Target only those who will buy

Who do you want to reach with your marketing message, exactly? College graduates? College graduates who own cars? College graduates who own a car, work in the medical field and live in area code N7T 1J0? Direct mail lists let you be as narrow or as broad as you need to be.

6. Measure your ROI

Direct mail is one of the best mediums for measuring the return on your marketing dollar. Simply code your business reply cards, and count how many return to you in the mail. Then calculate how many of those replies generate a sales meeting or a sale. Now you know immediately--and exactly--how effective your mailing has been. Direct mail numbers never lie.

7. Improve results through testing

Because you can measure your direct mail results, you can also test your mailings. Test one package against another, one list against another, one offer against another, and you'll discover what works and what fails. That way you'll spend your marketing dollars where they are most effective (without relying on guess work or hunches).

8. Predict future success

One advantage of knowing the success rates of your past mailings is that you can predict the success of future mailing. If you mail the same package with the same offer to a similar group of prospects at the same time of year, you can predict how many responses you will receive, and how many of those will translate into sales.

9. Generate immediate results

General advertising builds brand awareness. Sales brochures inform. But a direct mail letter asks for action now. So if you need to generate sales leads, and don't have time to wait for your ad to appear in "IT Buyers Quarterly," send a direct mail letter and wait a week for a response.

10. Involve readers in unique ways

Direct mail marketing is the only print medium that involves your prospects and clients in a hands-on kind of way. Your readers not only read your message, they experience it. They open it. Unfold it. Turn it over. Scratch on it with a nickel. Write on it. Mail part of it back to you (with their order).

11. Reduce wasted dollars

Direct mail marketing is the only print medium--bar none--that guarantees no waste circulation. You spend money talking to the people you want to talk to and don't spend a penny on anyone else.

12. Sell products that can't be sold through advertising

Direct mail sells some products and services that cannot be marketed efficiently in any other way. Seminars are a good example. So are credit cards. Neither of these things could be profitably marketed using general advertising, radio, television or trade shows.

13. Keep your marketing private

No other medium lends itself to a one-on-one, intimate, private dialogue between you and your customer. With every piece of communication you send your customers, you draw them closer.

14. Be as creative as your imagination allows

With direct mail, you are not limited to the dimensions of a newspaper or magazine page, or the real estate on a billboard. You can be as large or small as you desire.

15. Drive buyers to your website

Attract website visitors by mailing a simple, inexpensive postcard.

16. Acquire new customers

Mail a classic direct mail package featuring a sales letter, brochure and business reply card.

17. Strengthen relationships with your existing customers

Send a birthday card. Or an anniversary card (the anniversary of your customer's first purchase).

18. Increase repeat business

Include discount coupons and other incentives with the invoices that you already mail to your customers.

19. Introduce new products

Direct mail lets you send prospective buyers samples of what you are selling, whether in a box, a tube, poly bag or something else.

20. Increase retail traffic

Less expensive than an envelope and sales letter, self-mailers let you get your message across quickly. They are perfect for boosting traffic at your store.

21. Increase your sales territory with increasing your sales force

Direct mail is the perfect medium for generating leads for your sales force. A letter is cheaper than outbound telemarketing, and frees up your sales force to spend their valuable time closing sales instead of talking to cold leads.

22. Qualify prospects before meeting with them

When a prospect responds to your lead generation sales letter, how will you know if the prospect is a qualified lead or not, one who will turn into a buyer, or one who will simply waste your time? By qualifying them before they respond. Direct mail lets you ask qualifying questions on your reply device that separates buyers from brochure collectors.

23. Sell a lot for very little

A space ad in a metropolitan daily newspaper might set you back $15,000. But you can say twice as much as that--even four or ten times as much as that--by sending targeted prospects an inexpensive direct mail package that describes your product or service in detail.

24. Increase sales with a freebie

Direct mail is the only medium that lets you hand your prospect's an incentive to purchase. When you include a relevant, attractive premium in your package, you increase your chances of landing a sale.

25. Generate business from past customers

Short of picking up the phone or paying them a visit, direct mail is the simplest and most cost-effective way to win back the business of customers who have not given you a sale in some time.

26. Prepare prospects for telephone follow-up

Direct mail is a great way to "warm up" prospects so that your cold call becomes a warm call.

27. Take your store to your buyers

Direct mail catalogs are a unique marketing tool that lets you take your entire store to your customer's home or place of business, making their shopping experience more convenient.

28. Identify affluent buyers

When your product or service is expensive, direct mail is a cost-effective way to gather names and addresses of qualified prospects by mailing prospects a letter that asks them to show their interest.

29. Reach every buyer by neighbourhood

When you need to reach consumers or businesses in a particular area, direct mail is the way to go. You cannot trust that they will all read the newspaper, or hear your commercial on the radio. But you can be sure--100% sure--of reaching every single homeowner or business owner in a given geographical area with your flyer, newsletter, invitation or other direct mail piece.

30. Be direct

Unlike other forms of marketing communication, such as television commercials and magazine advertisements, direct mail does not use another medium to deliver your message. Direct mail gives you total control over the delivery of your message.