7 STEPS TO DIRECT MAIL SUCCESS

Direct mailing campaigns are a fantastic way to boost a business, receive a return on investment, all in a personalised and tailored way. Follow our 7 Steps to Direct Mail Success to help optimise specific campaigns and improve all chances of success, for the benefit of your business.

STEP 1: AUDIENCE

The first action that needs to be taken is determining who your target audience is to understand the specifics. Your design, your style of writing, etc, need to be tailored to this audience, to produce a stronger response per mailing ratio. Using your newsletter/mailing list is a great way to further analyse your audience- knowing they are interested in your company and have previously bought/worked with you. Having a more refined and targeted direct mail audience will improve all conversions and make for all-round better campaign.

STEP 2: DESIGN

The look of the product is a very important factor of any campaign, as it is the first thing the receiver sees, and needs to grab their attention. The design needs to stand out and be appealing enough that people want to look at it, open it, and act upon it, not throw it away. Being creative allows you to really be experimental with lots of different shapes, sizes, colours and images, which can make the difference between being like any other piece of post, or an interesting mail item.

STEP 3: MESSAGE

The copy of the mail should persuade the reader to act upon what they’ve read and want to do whatever the intended outcome of the direct mailing campaign was. Focusing the messaging on the benefits of your product/service, how you can solve problems, why yours is the best against competitors, whilst remaining jargon-free, concise and straight to the point, are important when convincing the reader. Trying to be persuasive in as few words as possible is a hard task, but is key when trying to make the most of readers’ attention span and aiming trying to keep your budget to a minimum.

STEP 4: PERSONALISATION

Personalised post impacts greatly on the response and open rate of mail. Tailoring mail helps to make a personal connection with the reader, so they feel more cared about and treated as an individual, rather than one of many customers. Using the recipient’s name, and involving unique offers, messages, graphics etc, will make them feel valued, and therefore more likely to engage. The use of synthetic personalisation, where you address mass audiences as though they are individuals through inclusive language techniques, is a linguistic method used by some marketing companies to save inputting time, whilst still remaining personal. Properties of such a technique would include pronouns such as “we” and “our”, or similarly using a more personal or informal tone, through humour and anecdotes.

STEP 5: AIM

Creating a CTA (Call to Action) for your campaign

will help drive action and convert recipients into customers. Making the CTA clear, yet easy, will help the reader know exactly what they need to do to act upon their “exclusive” offer/deal. Adding a time restriction or exclusivity will make the customer want to act fast in order to avoid missing out. When creating your CTA, your need to think what you want your recipient to do after receiving the mail? Whether it be visit your site, purchase a specific product, get in touch- you will need to create the CTA around this intended outcome.

STEP 6: INTEGRATION

Direct mail works best when integrated with other marketing channels, such as social media, websites, events and/or email marketing. Multi-channel promotion helps establish a more complete and immersive experience to build a relationship with customers across multiple channels, therefore optimising marketing results, and eventually improving sales. The piece of direct mail should include social media information, website details (on the site should be a newsletter sign-up button), and other pages used by the business, to help the customer keep up to date with the company and interact, but also help build a larger following. 

STEP 7: ANALYSIS

You will need to set trackable and realistic goals before the start of the campaign, in order to optimise and improve your strategy. Setting KPIs (key performance indicators) and defining what a successful campaign looks like to you will help you see whether you are on course to achieving these results, or not. You can do this by tracking whether people have responded to your CTA (call to action) through an offer code, landing page, tailored URL etc. By measuring and analysing these indicators, you can assess the areas that are working well, and which other areas will need to be improved. You can also test your target audience before the start of the large distribution by testing the campaign on a smaller audience to see the results on a smaller scale, and plan for the future based around these analytics.

These 7 steps should help you craft a defined, specifics and successful direct mailing campaign. Like most social media campaigns, trial and error is an important part of learning about how customers respond to your company through advertising, and it is how you analyse and put in to practise what you’ve noted, that makes a considerable difference.

We regularly produce and distribute tens of thousands of direct mail items, and our responsive customer service means that we can be relied upon to accurately carry out services and campaigns on your behalf.

If you are looking for more information or want to find out more about the direct mail printing services we can offer, call us on 0800 1300 964. From high impact printed envelopes to bespoke mailings, we can provide and supply the services you require. We would be delighted to meet with you and discuss your marketing requirements, so call us today!

GET IT OFF YOUR DESK – BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING YOUR DIRECT MAIL TO BOMBOUCHE

Sending out direct mail campaigns can be both time-consuming and costly. It’s why the majority of businesses use email or other digital communication methods as they are typically perceived as easy, quick and inexpensive.

Digital methods though, simply don’t provide the value and return that direct mail does. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reports that direct mail household response rate is 5.1% (compared to 0.6% for email, 0.6% for paid search, 0.2% for online display and 0.4% for social media). The highest response rate the DMA has ever reported.

To put that into perspective, the average cost of an email to 10,000 recipients including design and managing data costs £1200 and you would typically get 60 responses with 0.6% response rate. To send a direct mail campaign to 1200 people, the average cost is approximately £600 and with a 5.1% response, you’d typically get 61 responses. That’s half the cost and half the volume to see the same number of responses.

Integrating direct mail into your communication strategies will allow you to take advantage of comparatively high response rates and provide value for your customers, resulting in lead generation and sales revenue. But there’s no reason direct mail has to take up all of your time or your budget.

By outsourcing your direct mail to Bombouche you can:

Bombouche are dedicated to helping you save time and reduce your marketing costs while providing high-quality print and fast turnaround on all direct mail projects.

In the last 3 years, we have helped over 500 businesses by managing complex mailings, large-scale print projects and delivering material of the highest quality.

Get in touch with us to talk through your specific requirements in more depth by calling 0800 1300 964 or email sales@bombouche.com.

An introduction to the key types of Direct Mail?

Introduction
There’s a huge variety of different types of Direct Mail items that can be used to compliment your marketing efforts. These items are only governed by your imagination as simply put – if you can get it through a letterbox you can send it as part of your Direct Mail Marketing.

It’s not really that simple though, the larger you get the more specialist you get and the result is a huge cost per item. At this level engagement is high, and with the right targeting the returns are high – but there’s always more you can do with your marketing budget, so here’s 6 forms of Direct Mail that you can easily use in order to achieve your marketing goals.

Postcards 
Probably the most cost effective Direct Mail Marketing item that you can send, certainly the most widely used and there’s great reasons for that. With a postcard your offer, imagery, look and feel are all there right in your customers face the moment they pick up their mail, no other item has that impact.

That’s why marketing specialists use this type of item for special offers and promotions.

The downside of a postcard is that you are limited with the amount of information that you can give to your customer, that makes it harder to use for times when you are trying to give your customers more information about you, maybe when you are in the Awareness stage of your sales funnel.

Self Mailers
A slight expansion on the humble postcard, a self mailer could be as simple as an A4 sheet folded in half and sent in the post, it could be more. This offers more space for your content and you can reap all of the benefits of being able to offer eye catching designs and imagery that stand out to your clients, whilst furnishing them with a vast amount of content.

Personally, I think the self mailer is one of the best forms of Direct Marketing you can use, however there are cost implications. In order to achieve the largest postage discounts, in line with those achieved on postcards, you will need to glue the mailer shut or apply a number of tabs. This is an expensive finishing stage and can therefore be cost prohibitive.

Because of their diversity, self mailers are great to use at all stages of the sales process, no matter what your aim is they can be adapted to suite.

Letters
The humble letter actually tends to sit between the postcard and self mailer options in terms of cost, but it doesn’t have the same level of initial impact you can achieve with both Postcards and Self Mailers.  However, what you lose in initial impact you can gain from the content that you are able to put into a letter.

A well written, engaging letter works well for generating awareness. This is perfect for the prospecting stage of your funnel, especially if you are selling B2B or high value propositions. A letter builds trust, much more trust than an email, as such it starts off a relationship with loyalty and a high level of brand understanding and recognition.

Dimensional Mailers
These are a specialist type of mailer. 3 dimensional creating great intrigue, and engagement within the recipient. These are expensive items to produce and mail, but the costs are often justifiable when you take into account the response rates that are often achieved.

If you are looking for high worth prestigious clients, these mailers are perfect. Mail them in small volumes but reap the rewards, because they are so different.

Dimensional Mailers can be used at any stage of the sales funnel, however they often work best as part of the Conversion or Retention stages, as you can be perceived as putting in a lot of effort to keeping you customer.

Making a customer feel special or like a VIP always helps loyalty and encourages repeat purchases, Dimensional Mailers are a perfect fit for these tasks.

Catalogues
Even in the online world an offline catalogue has a lot of benefits. First and foremost amongst those is the ability to create lasting memories, it has been proven that offline material uses a different part of the brain than online. The parts of the brain activated by touch improve the recipients ability to recall messages and remember products.

It’s also been proven that mailers stay active in the household for more than 28 days, giving a reach within the whole household, not just those who browse your website. Often having a physical item in plain sight is enough to drive an online sale.

All in one Packages
Simply put this is everything or a number of the components that we’ve already spoken about, all gathered together and put into a single package and mailed. These are normally quite sizable items, so they cost a lot to produce and mail.

The aim however is to fast forward the sales funnel and make it a single hit, you’re giving your prospect everything that they need to make a decision to purchase in a single hit. These packages are powerful marketing beasts, but only in certain instances.

Software companies and the like selling B2B solutions tend to do well with these types of mailings, but anybody selling B2C is going to struggle with cost vs return.

Conclusions
As with everything marketing its all about getting ‘the most bang for your buck’ as they say, different scenarios require different approaches. I hope that this post has helped give you an insight into the different options available. There are a multitude more options available if you need an insight into something we’ve not covered just get in touch and one of our specialists will be able to assist.

Welcome On Board


Bombouche are pleased to welcome on board Johanna Russell as one of our new team members. Jo joins the company as we continue our expansion having doubled in size over the last 3 years.

She joins the studio, to replace Leigh Godfrey who has been promoted to the position of Studio Manager. Leigh has been a key member of our studio team for nearly 3 years now and his Adobe Creative Suite skills and knowledge will be a great resource for Jo as she starts our journey with us.

Jo, already has a significant amount of experience with the Adobe Creative Suite (our line of business Studio application), which she is keen to expand upon. She has been working primarily as a Graphic Designer for a number of years and we were highly impressed by her portfolio. Jo’s primary focus will be to create stunning mailings for our extremely diverse customer base, she will also assist our own internal marketing team updating the old and creating new materials as she learns about our business.

Managing Director, Martyn Harvey commented that “this addition to our team will enhance both our internal resources and the quality of service we can offer to our customers. We look forward to working with Jo as our company continues to grow rapidly.”

“She is part of the wider business plan, and hopefully in the near future we’ll be able to announce the appointment of even more members of the team, so watch this space!”, he continued.

Bombouche are a Full Service Direct Mail Provider working with customers from a wide variety of industries.  We create all types of mailings in house, from the simple and humble postcard to complete highly personalised multi-item mailing packs.

What to expect with International Mailings


There is no doubt that you currently work in a worldwide market, especially if your company sells products online.  Take our portal as an example, we’ve got customers from all over the world placing orders with us for mailings that are targeted to their UK customers, that’s very easily achievable and easy for us to control delivery cycles and landing days.

But, how does it work in reverse?  How do you as a UK based company market using letters and postcards to customers throughout the world.  Well the good news is that you can, we’ve been mailing worldwide for many years and there’s a number of products already on our website that enable you to do so.

We all know how reliable and predictable the Royal Mail can be with deliveries within the UK but what can we expect from international mailings?

Historically the reliability of overseas mailings hasn’t been great, they have taken a long time to deliver if at all – and it doesn’t take too much time to find blogs and reports on the internet from ex-pats that berate delivery services across the world.

This has changed though, providers around the world are transforming the way that they work and deliver, especially in developed countries.  So, what can you expect if you are sending your mailings overseas?  Here’s some pointers…

Targeted Landing Dates

We can’t give you a specific day on which your mailing will land, but we can give you a range of working days in which it should land:
•  4 – 6 Working days within Europe

•  6 – 9 Working days outside of Europe

Formats

•  We can mail Letters and Large Letters up to 750g

In conclusion, we’re able to make the process of international mailings as simple as undertaking a mailing in the UK, and what’s more we’ve got methods of posting that are incredibly cost effective.  To add to this the reliability of postal services in overseas countries is considerably better now than it used to be making it extremely worthwhile mining for customers among your overseas markets. 

Do’s & Don’ts of Event Marketing


Where/What should I do?

I spent a little bit of time in Devon recently, it’s a great opportunity to get out and about no matter what the weather, fortunately for this visit it was fantastic.

Whilst I was bouncing around our normal haunts, enjoying beaches and some very, very long walks I noticed a number of posters, signs and advertisements for a festival which was being held in the area later on this year.  With North Devon being one of my regular stopping points I was interested and looked a little bit closer.

Where is this festival being held?

Erm, well actually, erm…… all this marketing and nowhere was a mention of where the festival was going to be held, there were dates and times, there were acts and everything did a great job of informing the public of how great the event was going to be.  All of the marketing looked great but it didn’t tell me the one thing that I needed to know – where did I have to go to enjoy this festival?

That in itself is one of the major don’ts when advertising something, always make sure that you tell the customer…..

Miss any single one of those out and the public have to do something themselves to complete their picture of your event, ultimately they won’t do it even if they are interested and you’ll suffer with poor attendance.

Views from the data desk


Did you know that the Royal Mail have a set of guidelines that they publish for the benefit of all that stipulate quite simply how an address needs to look on mailing items?  Well they do, and whilst these are ‘guidelines’ we try, as best we can, to follow them – purely because we’ve found that by doing so our customers get a better response rate and benefit from higher postage discounts on more items.

With the addresses that we create on the letters being driven by supplied data, there’s a lot that can go wrong so with a little bit of ‘dark magic’ and custom tools we’re able to turn most data sets into a form that comply with these specifications.  

This is what an address should look like:

Bombouche
Berwick Hill Dairy
Berwick St Leonard
Salisbury
Wiltshire
SP3 5GN

But often, based on the data that we are supplied we have the following issues:

All data in a single column creates an address that looks like this:

Bombouche, Berwick Hill Dairy, Berwick St Leonard, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 5GN

Which not only will fail because its’ too long to fit into a window, will look terrible at the top of your letter!  My guess would be that there’s no chance that the recipient will even consider opening this – even if they receive it!

Commas in the data will most likely create an address that works, but it doesn’t conform to the Royal Mails specifications.  This will create an address that looks something like this:

Bombouche
Berwick Hill Dairy
Berwick St Leonard, Salisbury
Wiltshire
SP3 5SN

Now for something a little different, house numbers separated into a column of their own.  This also does not conform to the guidelines, so we have to ensure that this is corrected to look like this.

10 Sample Street
Sample Town
Sample County
Postcode

With the number in its own column, that address will look like;

10
Sample Street
Sample County
Postcode

It’ll get there, it just doesn’t look good and might not qualify for postage discounts.

There’s loads more examples and as a ‘Data Man’ I could go on about returns, foreign characters and various corruptions that occur when data is exported from systems – loads to think about, all of which we fix using a little bit of magic, but if you are contemplating creating mailing data yourself ask this question;

“What will the address look like once its printed and is that in a format that you would open should your letter come through your letterbox?!

What response rates are you getting?


I’ve been involved in a few conversations recently about response rates to direct mail and in some cases its been quite staggering the feedback that we’re getting from our customers. I’ll use one in particular as an example, but they are a just one of many that are tell us that mailings we’re undertaking for the are out performing the average.

Firstly, we have to understand that the average response rates for Direct mail is normally around 4%, as it has a number of attributes that make it a great method of communicating with your customers. But I have a customer who over 4 mailings throughout July, which is traditionally not a great month for mailings due to holidays, who has averaged a whopping 7.3% response rate.

That I think is absolutely staggering and it takes Direct Mail to the well and truly to the level where Direct mail is comparatively cheaper per opportunity generated that email!

Are they doing anything special? Not really, they do have different letter templates depending upon the area of the country that they are mailing to, but the content is the same. They use plain envelopes with our return address and as yet they haven’t embraced the Digital Stamp option which has been proven to increase responses by up to 2% as well!

It’s amazing the way that Direct Mail has managed to go full circle and is now well and truly shaking off the ‘Junk Mail’ tag and transformed into a communication medium that can be highly personalised and very, very attractive to those that are on the receiving end!

When Print Moves, 3 Ways AR Can Enhance Consumer Experience


Watching the coverage of Glastonbury brought home to me the extent to which people live their lives through the screens on their mobile devices.  To me I find it amazing to think that people spend a significant amount of money to go to these festivals and watch all of the artists on the screen of a phone.

Whether this is an ‘advancement’ in our behaviour is debateable but it does give me hope – more than that actually, confidence that the uptake of Augmented Print will be fast and explosive once it a component part of the Apple and Android operating systems.

What is Augmented Print?

Augmented print or Augmented Reality (AR) is when you use the combination of the camera on your mobile device and an app to view images.  The app simply overlays another piece of digital content over the picture which enables you to ‘bring your print to life’, the content could be pretty much anything that you have created so a video, 3D imagery, Twitter feeds or web pages as examples.

This technology has a wide variety of different uses, from unlocking content that compliments articles in magazines or newspapers right through to streamlining the number of touches required for a customer to make a purchase.

So How Can I Use AR?

1:  Bring products to life

There is no doubt that people are changing their purchasing habits and buying more online, but physically going somewhere to ‘try on’ or ‘view’ and item has been an essential for some items.  Furniture for example, cars or high end jewellery and clothing, makeup or even paint are all examples of products that the consumer would rather try or view prior to purchase.

Even then you still need an element of imagination to know how something might look when placed into your own personal environment.  With the use of AR however consumers could use apps to see how furniture will fit in their actual rooms, or how a watch might look on their wrist.  They might even be able to take a 3D look around the interior of a car or even ‘take it for a drive’!

2: Make print a streamlined sales channel

Online shopping is a great experience for the user, unfortunately it’s also a wide open market place, if you follow through the normal purchasing process a consumer might go through you’ll recognise that at some point they will search for the item they want to purchase through a search engine.  Once that search occurs they will have been exposed to a large number of your competitors – you may not even be on the first page of the search!!

With AR you can streamline this purchase process by enabling the consumer to enter straight into your online purchasing process without the need for them to undertake a product search, with this approach you automatically exclude all of your competitors from the purchasing process.

3: Enhance printed articles with digital content

In the digital era it’s quite the norm to create huge amounts of digital content, much of which is relevant to any articles or pieces you may write and put into print.  So, another use of AR is to enable your consumers to access this digital ‘complimentary’ content simply by opening the app and scanning a photo.

Examples of this could be recording a full interview with a celebrity and only using excerpts of that in print, with people only being able to access the full version in video format online.  This approach means that you can achieve a ‘minimalistic’ approach to your printed articles, but still deliver huge amounts of content.

In Conclusion

Today AR does have some great uses, especially if you are a large corporate company which already has a widely used APP or you have a captive, loyal audience that will invest in an app that you suggest.  But in my personal opinion, it’s not quite getting the mainstream attraction that it will have from Marketing Professionals in the future.   

Apple have made a lot of noise about using AR in future generations of their IOS for mobile devices.  Once this happens, I would expect AR to become an extremely important part of a Marketing Toolkit.  So, it becomes a simple equation of being a marketing leader by adopting new approaches now and using proprietary means to do so, or sitting back and waiting for AR to becomes a mainstream method of advertising.

Do you need to know everything about your customers to achieve Direct Mail success?


In the world in which we live data has great significance and offers great opportunity to the savvy marketer.  The problem often is that either the IT systems a business has in place, or a lack of intent from the customer, make it extremely hard to collect personal data.

Facebook do this extremely well, as part of the registration process, they collect an extensive cross section of information that is personal to you and throughout your use of the site most people update their details regularly.  This is one of the things that makes Facebook such a powerful beast when it comes to how they market themselves.

There is no question that they are right at the pinnacle of data capture, but with a building reluctance for customers to release personal information to suppliers how do you collect this information – even if your company has the systems in place to store it?

Or is there another way?

Actually there are two, one utilises what I would class as a very splatter gun approach, which is to use a Door Drop, all you do is pick a Postcode sector (or number of) and send a marketing item to every resident in the area.  Sounds simple, well it is, you can concentrate your offer and artwork pick an area – give it a go.  Response rates are low, less than 0.5% but the cost is low as well.

The second option is to take a look at Unaddressed mail, for this one you’ll need to put in a little bit of effort into your data, in that you need to know your customers postcode, that’s all the rest is covered by the assumption that people with similar demographics live is similar neighbourhoods and thus the same postcodes.

Unaddressed mail is like a supercharged Door Drop per say, this is due to the fact that you are using a basic form of targeting to boost your response rates, significantly.  Those increases could be from less than 0.5% for a Door Drop to more than 2.5% for Unaddressed Mail, all in all this means that a 30,000 Door Drop with maybe 150 responses changes to a 20,000 Unaddressed Mailing with potentially 500 responses – all for the same amount of spend.

Conclusion

Personally I think it’s a no brainer, if you’re considering using a Door Drop as part of your outgoing/direct Marketing campaigns then using Unaddressed Mail I feel gives you a much better Return on Investment and engagement rate.  On top of all of that you gain the benefit that Mail offers much more per household than email. 

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