We occasionally hear “my direct mail campaign did not work” when we are talking with prospects. Often, the actual practice of the marketing tactic of mailing potential customers is not what did not work. We see several mistakes applied to direct mail that can affect returns. Melissa, a well known marketing data platform, reports there are ten top mistakes made when using direct mail. The top three that we see? 

  1. Using the wrong list 
  2. Trying only one mailer
  3. No testing before committing big dollars to a campaign

We cannot stress enough about these few common issues. First, your house list is the master, if you have one. These people are existing customers, past customers, prospects who did not say yes the first time and potential prospects who may already be in your pipeline. Create some personas based on these people to determine what your purchased list make up should contain. Second, one mailer will rarely generate the return desired, especially with a population of people who receive over 1 million advertising messages per day. Try a series of mailings, online advertising follow up and other omnichannel marketing options to reach your potential customers. Lastly, test your direct mail campaigns on a smaller sample group before mailing to 10,000 people. We even advocate for sending two different versions of your mailer to two different groups of 1000 people and see what type of response you get from each. You can also test your message on social networks, Google Ads, email marketing and other marketing venues. Once you have something dialed in, THEN send out your mailers. 

Interested in seeing the top ten from Melissa? Click below for the full article: 

https://blog.melissa.com/data-driven-marketing/index.php/2019/01/02/the-10-worst-mistakes-in-direct-mail/