2 Quick Hints for a Stronger Direct Mail Package

1. Ask for the Order
-- ask for it often
-- ask for it in different ways
-- ask for it aggressively enough
Ask repeatedly on every panel within your package! Don't be shy and don't rely on the last paragraph of your letter be the one and only request in your entire package – it's a weak strategy that produces weak results.

2. Instantly Increase the Substance of Your Offer
Instead of a vague offer of “send for free information,” create substance with a more tangible offering. Ask the reader to instead send for “Information Packet #12.” Not only does this sound like something of greater substance, but it implies the existence of a line of valuable information, lending credibility.

If You Think Direct Mail Is Dying, Think Again!

You've heard it before and you'll hear it again ― direct mail is dying. How many lives does this cat have? With every new marketing channel created, or improved, the eulogies start for direct mail. The truth is direct mail will not be leaving us anytime soon.

Like internet advertising, social networking, newspapers, radio and TV, direct mail is simply another tool to get your message out. How you use it, and how much you use it, depends on your marketing strategy and your target audience. No one tool can do it all and a strong marketing strategy is one that's integrated and based on your organization's goals.

Here are the facts about the current health of direct mail in a report from the United States Postal Service:

According to the USPS Household Diary Study, in 2008, U.S. households received 148.6 billion pieces of mail, and sent 21.3 billion.

Advertising mail represented 63% of all mail received by households in 2008.

According to McCann-Erickson, says the report, American businesses spent about $271 billion in 2008 advertising their products and services, a decrease of 3.2% from 2007. Of this total advertising spending, 22% was spent on direct mail. In 2008, more than one-fifth of total advertising dollars was spent on direct mail advertising.

Direct mail was the second leading media choice of advertisers in 2008, after television. However, due to a steep economic downturn, direct mail advertising spending fell 1.0% compared to 2007. Except for the Internet and Other, all other spending media categories declined as well.

Direct mail's share of total advertising spending has been on a strong upward trend for most of the past 17 years. Since 1999, the direct mail share has risen steadily reaching 22% in 2008. Direct mail has maintained its large ad share even with the introduction of new, fast-growing ad markets such as the Internet.

Ultimately, advertisers send direct mail because it works, says the report. Household members read and respond to it. Households report they intend to respond to about one in ten pieces of advertising mail. While intended responses do not always lead to actual responses, the data presented help explain why direct mail is the number one choice of advertisers in America, concludes the study.

View the full report from USPS.

What's the status of your direct mail program's health? If it needs a check up and some new life breathed into it give us a call. Measured Marketing can also help you decide if taking a more integrated approach is appropriate for your marketing strategy.

info@measuredmktg.com
312.929.4882

Get the Home Field Advantage with Trade Area Analysis

Do you know who your best customers are and how to identify prospective buyers just like them? In a tough economic climate it's more important than ever to properly analyze your competitive market before crafting your marketing campaign strategy.

With the right mapping tools and a systematic approach it's possible to learn a lot of valuable information about your clients, trade area and competition — why work on a level playing field when you can take the advantage? Measured Marketing can assist in...

Identifying neighborhoods loaded with customers and prospects

Defining your trade areas by drive-time and by driving habits

Understanding how and where your competitors

affect your business everyday

And with this information you can enhance your marketing strategy by:

• Targeting households most likely to respond (the low-hanging-fruit!)
• Capturing data on the back-end of your direct mail efforts
• Re-mailing non-responders (create a prospect database)
• Retaining and growing responders (create a customer database)
• Protecting against competitive incursions
• Taking advantage of exits by competitors

Contact Measured Marketing today to analyze your trade area and create a strategic plan to protect and grow your home field advantage.

info@measuredmktg.com
312.929.4882

Be a Savvy Mailer and Save!

With ever-increasing postage rates in cost-conscious times, it is more important than ever to mail smart – start today by learning what your lettershop could be investigating and doing for you!

Don't Cut Corners
To offset postage and materials cost increases, it is increasingly up to you and your designer to do more with less while maintaining desired response rates. Cutting corners can directly and indirectly impact the quality, timeliness and response rates of your direct mail effort:

• Reducing the quality of materials may result in less aesthetically-pleasing packages which could be unfortunate if your package has a proven track record for producing a good response rate.
  
  
• By decreasing the number of test packages, some opportunities for discovering new controls and trying alternative directions may be missed.
  
  
• Frequently changing vendors in order to find the lowest cost provider can actually end up costing you more. Not developing and maintaining long-term relationships with vendors can result in increased uncertainty of the quality and timeliness of materials or service. Lack of vendor loyalty may also result in a lower comfort level, communication oversights and negotiating leverage for schedule considerations.

The Solution – Mail Smarter and Save Money
Fortunately, there are many ways to increase cost savings! Postage is the largest portion of direct mail program costs, often 5-10 times the production costs of a mailing. Thus a few percentage points reduction in postage can be very substantial and have a more dramatic effect on the budget than cutting corners in design or production.

“The more your mailer does to move the mail,
the more you save on postage.”

Various data processing and postal sortation processes can be combined to realize postage savings and increased speed of mail piece delivery.

1. How clean is your list? Data files need regular hygiene – including address correction alternatives, merge/purges to remove duplicates, suppressing records and more. The more your direct mail service provider does to clean your files and move the mail, the more you save on postage
   
   
2. After the file hygiene has been completed and you have your targeted and deliverable addresses, it is important to be sure to maximize the postal savings to these addresses. Mailing to destination entry(s) is a way to dramatically decrease the piece rate that you pay for mailing your programs. BMCs (Bulk Mail Centers) and SCFs (Sectional Center Facilities) are destination entry USPS facilities located throughout the country, between the post office of entry and recipient. Delivery of mail to these facilities saves the USPS money on internal freight and sortation, resulting in savings which are passed along to the mailer through a reduced postage rate.
   
   
3. To fully realize potential savings, it is imperative that a Destination Entry Analysis be done on all standard (3rd) class mailings. Once qualified, most mailers will charge a small processing fee and freight costs will be incurred to bring the mail to each destination entry facility. A thorough analysis of each mailing will determine whether there are net savings in mailing to destination entry(s). If the postage savings exceed the slight costs of processing, freight and any minimum costs, then the mail should be sorted down to the BMC/SCF level.
   
   Please note that many mailers have a previously determined minimum quantity for drop shipping mail that they use to determine whether or not mail is sorted down to the BMC/SCF level. It is important to request that your mailer not set minimums for your mailings to be considered for BMC/SCF sortation based on an arbitrary quantity, but rather analyze each mailing and destination entry to determine net savings. Though the postal savings can seem marginal when looking at a per piece rate, for larger mailings especially, the difference between the postage savings and the fees and freight can be tremendous!
   
   
4. Beyond the financial savings realized by destination entry postal sortation, there are additional benefits which should be considered. Destination entry sortation increases control of the timing of delivery in-home as well as reporting possibilities. Mailings that have time-sensitive in-home dates can be more narrowly targeted and, with additional costs to expedite freight, can be delivered sooner if needed. BMC/SCF “tracking” reports are also fairly standard and supplied by most carriers as requested – these reports show dates and times of mail delivery to each destination entry facility.

With postage savings offering such great potential for stretching direct mail budgets, it's important for you to be familiar with these cost-saving processes. Rather than simply requesting quotations on material and lettershop costs – it should be a regular practice to compare postal analysis from vendors to see where additional savings might be realized. Vendors who recognize the benefits of aggressive postal sortation as a competitive advantage should be eager to run a demo postal analysis on files for their clients.

Postage is the only place within your direct mail budget where you can cut costs with no ill effect on your package or results. Be sure to ask your vendor to show you how to mail smarter!

Not sure whether your vendor is mailing smarter? Contact us today for a complimentary 2nd opinion at info@measuredmktg.com or 312.929.4882.