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.