Regardless of whether you are mailing 250 pieces or 25,000, the objective of a mailing is typically the same – you want it to be successful! In the world of commerce, most mailings are targeted at “Customer Acquisition” or “Customer Retention”; you want to gain new customers or you want existing customers to revisit your services.
At AmazingMail we process thousands of Mailings, and because we track customer results, we see plenty of success. This allows us to see practices that tend to work, and practices that tend to fail. From this, we have devised a few simple steps to guarantee a successful mailing.
The 5 elements of Mailing Success or failure:
- Defining success
- Targeting & Timing
- Designing the mail piece
- Defining the response process
- Campaign Measurement
Defining success:
It may seem obvious, but defining the objective of a Mailing is the first and most vital step. How can you select your target audience or design your mail piece if you don’t have set marketing goals for success? Without a target result, you can’t determine its success or failure.
Many of our customers are small businesses with a limited number of employees – but typically more than one person has an interest or some input into a proposed Mailing. As soon as there is more than one person involved, there is an immediate need to get everyone on the same “page” (or the same “Postcard” for many of our customers).
The Sales Manager may expect the mailing to increase sales for the quarter, while the accountant may want the mailing to encourage sales of outdated merchandise. Now, just imagine the problems the graphics department faces to design the mail piece!
So, the very first step is to get consensus on what you are trying to achieve, write it down and then put a number on it. If you want to keep your budget, don’t settle for sayings like, ‘find more customers”, “increase sales” or “move that old stuff”, and gain measurable ROI.
Targeting & Timing
Once we have decided what we want to achieve, the rest is easy – Get the right offer to the right people at the right time!
Look out for Part II. Targeting and Timing, next month…
