Direct mail is a mainstay of marketing and an important part of successful multi-channel campaigns. Even in today's digital environment, where reports of time spent online can exceed 10 hours per day, direct mail remains relevant. Direct mail marketing by the numbers: Direct mail garners 7x more responses than all digital channels combined54% of consumers prefer direct mail for promotions 60% of direct mail recipients were prompted to visit a promoted website40% of consumers made a purchase in the past 3 months because of direct mailYet, with the cost of printing and postage driving direct mail budgets, you may be looking for ways to optimize your direct mail campaign without reducing quantity or quality. Here are ways to successfully implement a direct mail campaign. 1. Maintain your mailing list properly and invest wisely in new lists. Direct mail, in many ways, comes down to the mailing list. You might have an award-winning design, a highly motivating offer, and a coordinated landing page, but if your audience isn't qualified in the first place, your campaign can be a waste of time and money. If you are already getting a good response to your direct mail, it is essential that you continue to clean up your list of bad addresses and returned mail. To do this, you will need to include a return address on your direct mail item and remove recipients of returned items from your list.
Likewise, once someone responds to Employee Email Database your direct mail, flag them on your list to avoid delivering duplicate content. Consider mailing lists with reduced postage rates, such as EDDM (direct mail to every door) or carrier route lists if your products or services are suitable for all consumers. Because these pieces aren't targeted and instead go to every mailbox in a chosen area, you'll save a lot on postage, the lion's share of direct mail costs. 2. Make sure your business is ready to track lead sources and optimize them if necessary. Marketing without a way to track results creates inefficiency. How can you maximize what works and improve what doesn't if you don't have insight into your campaign's performance? This is where tracking comes in. The importance of follow-up cannot be overstated. Direct mail follow-up can be tricky because a lot can happen between the time your prospect receives your marketing piece and the time they take action.
For prospects who call you directly using the phone number on your direct mail, a unique phone number and call tracking provider is essential. Call tracking offers businesses a great way to identify which marketing channels are generating leads. Call tracking lets you use unique forwarding numbers for each marketing channel, like direct mail, to help you identify which campaigns are generating the most calls. But what about prospects who connect before calling you? You can use online call tracking on your contact landing pages that drive leads online from your direct mail. Using features like CallRail's Dynamic Number Insertion, you can tag new leads that come to your website from your direct mail with a call tracking number. This not only makes the transition from offline to online seamless, but also ensures that these leads are tagged with the correct source information from the start, even if they interact with other marketing channels before conversion. Here's a breakdown of why you'll want to implement call tracking for all your campaigns, and direct mail campaigns in particular: