3 Key Elements of Direct Mail

I often compare direct mail to a first date.

You dress yourself up in your finest clothes, put your best face forward, and hope for the best.

That's a lot like direct mail.

You take your message, craft it as clearly, cleverly, and concisely as you can, and hope it impresses your audience enough to take action. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

But don't let that discourage you!
Direct mail really does work and it is still relevant, even in this age of online marketing. The key is conducting it in a way that is smart and cost effective.

In this article, I'll focus briefly on three key elements of direct mail. Do these things right, and you'll be well on your way to creating a profitable direct mail campaign.


Mail To The Right List

Mailing to the right people or organizations is critical in direct mail. The perfect message directed to the wrong audience is, quite frankly, a waste of your time and money.

When determining who to mail your message to, I encourage you to be as specific as possible. For example, don't mail your piece about hot flashes to women under the age 30. They have no reason to care -- yet. And don't mail your postcard about retirement to a zip code loaded with college students. Again, they don't care.

Test, Test, Test

While you may think you know what your market wants, none of us really knows for certain. That's why we test.

There's an ongoing debate within the direct mail industry about how many elements should be tested at once. My opinion is to test just one element at a time so that you get good, clean results.

So, for example, next month you may want to test your offer.

Let's assume that you have to charge a certain amount for your product or service, but you want to test the manner in which your "deal" is presented.

So you mail a "2-for-1" offer to half of the names on your list and a "50% off" offer to the other half of your names. Yes, this is essentially the same offer, but you're testing how the two different ways of presenting it are perceived. (You may be quite surprised by how your marketing may respond to one vs. the other.)

You can test almost anything -- from headlines to body copy to colors to fonts. Just be sure to set your direct mail campaign up in a way that will enable you to read your test results and allow them to help determine what you do next.

Carefully Track Your Results

The value of any good direct mail campaign is in the results. That's why it is so important that you set up your campaign and test in a manner that makes it easy to read and act upon your results.

The key is to learn something in every campaign that can be applied to your next campaign. This is how you stay in the mail profitably.

Reading your results can be tricky, but after a few campaigns you’ll likely be very good at it.

I really hope that this information will help you today. While direct mail can be expensive, done the right way, it is an incredibly effective tool to include in your marketing mix.

3 Key Elements of Direct Mail - To learn more about this author, visit 's Website.

Like this article? Share it with your friends

Article Tags: Recent Search: direct mail key

---

	No article feedback found.
	Leave Your Feedback

---

Staging Diva Debra Gould, aka The Staging Diva®, is President of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company. Inspired by many requests from aspiring home stagers wanting to start similar businesses, Gould created the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Gould has trained 4000+ students worldwide to start staging businesses. Buying decorating and selling six of her own homes in four years lead to an interest in real estate staging which she turned into a career with the launch of sixelements.com in 2002. Since then she has staged hundreds of homes in addition to teaching home staging training. Gould is the author of several home staging resources including a series of popular home staging guides made up of a Design Guide, Color Guide, Portfolio Guide and Twitter Guide. For more information about Debra Gould visit stagingdiva.com. - Visit Staging Diva's Website

Kim Castle With nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website

To learn more about the Evan Elite Author Program please contact us.

Subscribe to 's articles (Visit 's Website) is a New Account author on EvanCarmichael.com

's Complete List Of Women-Entrepreneurs Articles Name Email If you enjoyed this article, get 's Complete List of Women-Entrepreneurs Articles For FREE! More Are You Telling Another Story Marketing vs Public Relations Dealing With A Difficult Client How To Increase Your Profits In A Bad Economy 3 Key Elements of Direct Mail GCD Explains Direct Mail Basics When Writing Bad is Good How Much Copy Is Too Much Copy