5 Direct Mail Best Practices That Are Proven to Increase ROI

The world of direct mail marketing is always changing, and the industry’s best practices continue to evolve. Here are the 5 most important practices for mailers to implement in 2020.

Refining your direct mail marketing program to yield better results and ROI is always the goal, but how do you get to that point? You can get a good start by making sure you’re following the industry’s best practices—proven techniques and methods that put you in a better position to succeed.

Here are five direct mail best practices every marketer should follow to mail more efficiently and effectively in 2020.

1. Personalize the content

Your audience has an increasing appetite for personalized content, so make sure your direct mail pieces include information that speaks directly to each reader. Start by addressing each reader by name and continue by including demographic, geographic, or even personal information in the content to garner attention.

Personalizing your direct mail collateral is surprisingly easy once you’ve gathered the relevant information, as you can use variable data printing to insert custom content into a template. From there, each member of your audience gets customized material, to which they are more likely to respond.

2. Have a clear call to action

Having a clear call to action, or CTA, in your direct marketing tells readers what you want them to do.

If you want your readers to visit your website, tell them so. Your call to action should give a clear reason to visit the site and provide the URL, too, which can also be personalized to track response.

Likewise, if you want your readers to call you, tell them to call and provide the phone number.

Creating a clear call to action seems simple, but many marketers make things too complicated and confuse the reader. You undoubtedly want the people you’re mailing to complete an action, so always tell them what you want them to do and how they can do it.

3. Include a can’t-miss offer

Why should your readers consider your offer?

When you consider the fact that the average person is exposed to as many as 10,000 ads per day, there’s an incredible amount of competition for every consumer’s attention.

Are you providing an offer that cuts through the noise and generates legitimate interest for your readers? If not, your direct mail campaign won’t reach its potential because your recipients will turn their attention to more attractive offers.

Give your customers a reason to follow through on your call to action for the best possible results throughout your direct mail marketing efforts.

4. Provide multiple ways to respond

Not every potential customer will want to call you, and some won’t be confident about sending an email or filling out a web form.

The key to overcoming these obstacles is to offer multiple ways for consumers to respond to your offers. Different people will have different preferences, so you want to eliminate possible resistance in your audience by providing as many options as possible.

Someone who receives your offer while watching their kids may not be able to make a phone call but could send you a text message. Likewise, someone with poor typing skills might not want to email but could be more than happy to talk on the phone.

The more comfortable you can make your readers with the response process, the easier you’ll find it to generate a dialogue with potential customers.

5. Test and optimize

Just because you’ve designed your direct mail marketing material doesn’t mean you’ve completed your work. Direct mail is a continuous process that you should often test and adjust on the fly depending on the response you generate.

By conducting A/B testing, you can see what is working and what isn’t, and optimize your strategy based on the findings. It helps to have testing goals in place before you begin so you can benchmark your successes and failures by tracking results.

You’ll want to achieve a positive ROI throughout your campaign, but you also might focus your goal on response or conversion rates, the total number of sales you make, or how much the campaign increases opt-in numbers.

The goals are up to you, but make sure you adjust your strategy, targets, or content if you aren’t meeting the desired metrics.

Reaching your marketing goals

Following direct mail best practices will put your campaigns on the right track and make it more likely that you’re providing customers a piece of content they want to engage with. Testing and adjusting your strategy will also put you in an excellent position, because it prevents you from blindly trying new things without studying the analytics.

With over 16 years of experience, Gunderson Direct is one of the country’s most respected direct mail marketing agencies. We can assist you throughout the mail design, execution, and deployment process, ensuring that you’re following the best practices and achieving your desired goals. Drop us a line for more information on how we can aid your marketing campaign.