Moving on with Direct Mail

And for Chicago sports today... [long, uncomfortable silence]. Enough said.

On that note, I'm on to research a little more on how social bookmarking and RSS feeds tie into the big ole social networking picture, but more on that later. I thought now would be a good time to bring up another cross-over marketing tactic; direct mail. It has been a pretty effective tool for a lot of our clients, whether it's B2B or B2C. Our approach has always been to test, test and test with the following components:

1. Test the call-to-action- Every piece needs to relay a message or offer to the client that gives them a reason to react. With offset printing I can usually get three jumbo postcards up on a sheet... this means I can test three messages.
   
2. Test target markets- I like to get my list and break it down into persona's. For businesses it might be verticals such as insurance or banking, where for consumer marketing it might be moms or teens.


3. Test the geo-market- I also like to break my list down into geographic boundaries. For example I might test city versus rural.
   

By breaking my direct mail projects down in this facet, I can create a matrix to test each campaign and create some sort of coding to measure return. Obviously the return mechanism would be different for each client, but some low-tech solutions include placing a code on the direct mail piece and have the operator ask for the code or bring the piece in for redemption. Some of the high tech mechanisms in the past have included landing pages or RCF (Remote Call Forwarding) lines to track the return. Once the returns are counted and placed in the spreadsheet, you would get something that looks like the chart below. Well, shucks, it looks like Offer 3 was the big dog and it seemed to work the best with Target Market 3. And it worked even better in Geo Target 2. So, what did I learn here? Hopefully I received a good return overall, but more importantly, what can I do next time? In this case I'd know where to put my dollars for my next direct mail campaign.

All of this is fine and dandy and has helped us develop some pretty darn good campaigns over the years. But now there's something even cooler out there. Tomorrow I'll give a little shot out to purl's and variable data printing... where the "fit hits the shan."

You can Click Here to see a few direct mail samples to help you out.