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There are numerous ways to make your marketing budget go further – without compromising on effectiveness or quality. Plan ahead and use the expert help of a reputable mailing house to enable you to achieve the highest return on investment you can for your direct mailing campaign. While some of these top tips are simply common sense others may hopefully provide food for thought…

1. Postage is number one on this list of money saving tips for a good reason; it takes a large chunk out of your direct mailing budget and so needs your urgent attention. In order to cut down on costs enlist the help of experts at a professional mailing house since they will be able to advise you about the many postage discounts offered by Royal Mail and its numerous competitors. For instance, ‘Mailsort 700′ is a postal service which can offer you as much as a 25% postage discount if you are mailing more than 4000 items.

2. Save money on envelopes by becoming informed about the cost implications of the various sizes of envelopes – mailing house tend to buy in bulk, saving them money and they can pass on these discounts to you; and make sure to get advice with regard to which weight of envelope will best suit your mailing requirements.

3. It pays to mail to existing customers: Buying in lists is expensive. If you don’t have the expertise to create your own lists, then arrange for a reputable mailing house to manage your database since they will have the necessary skills and experience to extract the information you need. But – importantly – be very clear about the attributes of your target market and give your direct mailing supplier an in-depth brief.

4. Make sure your mailing lists are ‘clean’ – You do not wish to find out that your mailing has been sent to people no longer at the listed addresses by having it sent back marked ‘Return to Sender ‘(it is estimated that up to a third of addressees move in a two year period) which is expensive and wasteful;by making sure your lists are accurate, with no duplicates, extra postage discounts are available -of up to 27%.

5. When ‘buying in’ lists make sure you are allowed to use the list more than once thereby reducing the mailing costs on repeat mailings. It also makes sense to ‘test’ new lists by mailing to a proportion of it before buying the whole list: See whether you get an adequate response rate – after all, sending mail to millions of individuals you have never contacted before cannot be seen as good practice. Testing the market is often overlooked by direct marketing managers when working to tight budgets, but testing is a crucial aspect of a cost-effective direct marketing campaign.

6. Include more inserts in your mailings – placing additional materials which promote your company’s offerings in with statements and invoices helps cut down on marketing costs -postage rates stay the same up to certain weights. If sending out mailings promoting one particular product or service, it pays to try cross-selling related products – by including extra leaflets your mailing can be more productive with little extra cost.

7. Gather information about all postage costs well in advance of finalising the design of planned mailing pieces. Direct marketing professionals have been known to design and print attractive mailing pieces without checking beforehand how much it will cost to assemble and post them – proving extremely uneconomical at later stages of the campaign. Staff at an experienced mailing house will be able to tell you the costs involved in your proposed mailing before you finalise creative decisions saving you potentially a great deal of money.

8. Measure the effectiveness of all your direct marketing campaigns and work out the cost per response and cost per order – also how much money has a customer spent with you over a given period of time. Those who have spent the most with you recently are likely to be good prospects to buy again.

9. Direct marketing campaigns are prone to setbacks along the way so allow extra time to be planned in so that your mailing house has can complete the job on schedule-marketing materials will need at least a week to print and time needs to be included for delivery to and from the mailing house.; busy mailing houses have to work to tight schedules – if your materials turn up late from the printer there will be cost implications both for the mailing house and for you.

10. A good mailing house will be able to offer you new options as regards printing – the use of a four colour press is no longer a necessary requirement – digital printing can get you good results and is potentially cheaper and faster – especially if mailings are on the small side or for test mailings. The use of digital printing provides you with an increased ability to personalise mailings making targeting your customers easier.

Direct Mail is one of the latest trends nowadays in marketing different products and services. If done correctly, it can surely be an instrument to boost your sales and investment returns. But some are raising their eyebrows when they hear about the use of direct mail in advertising their businesses. They don’t see much of the positive results it can bring. Many think that direct mail is just a typical mail that we send to someone but it is more than that. Direct mail is quite different.

Have you ever asked yourself why is it called direct mail? Well, it is called so because it asks for a direct response from its recipients. A direct mail can be sent in a form of a letter, post card, door hanger, or other stuff that catches much attention. There are also a lot of factors that affect the response rate of every direct mail campaign. Quality of the list is one of these factors. Timing of the mailing is also another factor since time of the week, month, or year that you send your mail to your targeted clients also has an effect on the response rate of the customers. Response rate is also affected with the quality of the mails that you’re sending. A direct mail should have the following components like well-thought headline, good consumer benefits, well-established credibility, good offer and a good quality of paper used.

To achieve great results in your direct mail campaign, it is necessary that after every campaign you keep track on the timing, the specifics that you have done, the special offers given, response rates, and sales that are generated. Through this analysis, you can work on the things that need improvement and changes to boost more your sales growth. While doing the analysis, don’t be fooled with very high response rates. Of course having 100 responses and 2 sales is not that impressive compared to 5 responses and 4 sales. Yeah it is good to have high response rates but generating much higher sales through your marketing investment is still the ultimate measurement of success.

Going back to the components of a well-made direct mail piece, it’s essential that you consider if the mail that you are making is actually addressing the concerns and needs of your clients. If you want it to catch much attention, don’t send out a vanilla or shall we say yellow-paged type ad. A good direct mail piece should:

1) Be personalized if possible
2) Be crafted as an ad in letter form
3) Address the concerns of the recipient
4) Be stated in terms of benefits rather than features or advantages
5) Highlight the things that set you and your service/product apart
6) Ask for a direct response from the recipient; and
7) Include an incentive to take action now.

So to wrap up, direct mail can be a great instrument in boosting your sales if done correctly. While crafting your mails, you have to always check your marketing investment and at the same time track the timing, response rate, conversion rate, and the sales generated as a result of your direct mail campaign. If you just craft an excellent direct mail piece and run a campaign often, for sure you can soar high and reach your targeted sales and profit sooner than what you are expecting.