In recent years, direct mail response rates have increased dramatically, which has been good for both marketers and their customers.
According to warranty services provider After Inc., response rates for prospect and home lists nearly doubled between 2017 and 2018, citing research from the Association of National Advertisers as an example.
Such developments highlight the need of maximizing the ROI potential of your direct mail marketing!
11 Ideas to increase the response rates
- Keep It Simple
Consumers sort through their mail in an average of 8.4 minutes, according to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Mail Moments Review. Because of this, businesses have a very limited window of opportunity to successfully communicate offers, promotions, and messages to direct mail recipients.
Make sure this isn’t too complicated, confusing, or detailed. Keep it clear, brief, and easy to read using understandable text and copy and a minimalist style. Ensure that your call to action is prominently displayed.
- Give Your Offer a Deadline
A deadline can encourage a customer to act right away or risk missing out on a unique offer. This may encourage hesitant shoppers to make a decision and do something, like call, go online, or visit a store.
- Choose the Right Clientele
Segment your target based on a range of demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral traits before sending your mail piece.
This entails segmenting prospects based on factors including age, gender, purchase patterns, internet visits, event attendance, industry, and interests.
Once you’ve done that, you may either use a home list or buy a mailing or prospect list. A targeted mailing list enables personalization and guarantees that you are contacting people who are interested in and responsive to your offer.
- Use the Proper Design and Colors
Your designs have an effect on how customers choose to react. To ensure that all receivers recognize your mail piece as coming from your company, it’s crucial to include your brand’s colors and emblems in it.
The remaining elements of the design should complement your branding and advance your message.
- Keyphrases that highlight the value
Brilliant pictures and imaginative graphics may pique your reader’s interest, but it’s also crucial that you communicate with them. Regardless of the structure and length of the material in your direct mail piece, you should use as many keywords as you can—words that will appeal to your intended audience.
Think about using bold type or additional color to draw attention to these statements and your call to action. The value of your company or product should be emphasized in your message, along with what action you want your audience to take.
By doing this, you can guarantee high response rates that will increase the effectiveness of your direct mail campaign.
- Customize It
Success is driven by customization. Direct mail response rates can be considerably increased by personalizing a letter at three or more locations.
The returns for [variable data printing] range from double the typical return at the basic level to 10 to 15 times the return for completely variable jobs, according to the CDMP.
Companies can customize each element of a direct mail piece, including the text, font, image, and background color, to their target audience by using variable data printing.
- Choose the perfect size for envelopes
According to data, huge envelopes receive a response rate of 5%. Response rates for postcards and catalogs are 4.25 and 3.9 percent, respectively.
We contend that you can go one step further by personalizing your envelope as well.
A distinctive envelope goes above and beyond the attention-grabbing qualities of a large envelope. We believe that combining the two will significantly increase your outcomes.
- Maintain consistency with the design
Prospects must be able to distinguish between those that are truly yours and those that are not. The last thing that customers want to do is waste time opening every package that comes through the door. They want to be able to swiftly sort through mail, opening some and discarding the rest.
Fortunately, the answers are straightforward. Adding a distinctive mark to your mail will hasten this procedure. Your open rates are more likely to increase the more visibility you have.
- Combine it with other marketing tools
When reading analyses of direct mail marketing, you will almost always discover that the researchers only take the technique into account. This is, strictly speaking, the scientific method; you want to account for as many factors as you can.
Unfortunately, the actual world doesn’t operate that way. Most companies use a variety of media to market. Surprisingly, research indicates that combining marketing strategies can boost response rates by about 20%.
In other words, when you combine internet marketing, TV, print, and direct mail marketing, the overall strategy performs better than any of the separate channels.
- Allow users to reply to letters online
It takes a lot of effort to tear off the coupon, fill out the form by hand, and mail it. The reply must not only locate a pen and complete the form, but also make the effort to go to the post office.
Therefore, moving the response process online is a fantastic approach to raise open rates. You merely provide login information in your marketing letter and inform them that they can answer using a smartphone.
- Find out which direct mail generates the most responses.
Put personalization to the test with your direct mail. A/B testing is made simple with online printing, allowing you to determine which variation of an image, color, or message resonates with your target audience and generates the most feedback.
When creating new direct mail or other marketing efforts, this kind of personalization and consumer testing is particularly helpful because it ensures higher response rates as your company expands
Conclusion
The popularity of direct mail is well known, and businesses do use it as a good marketing campaign. But the response rates for this type of campaign could be difficult to achieve.
There are many ideas that organizations can implement to get the desired results like – choosing the right audience for this campaign, creating the perfect template, and combining it with other marketing tools as well.