advertising objective might be to develop new markets through the acquisition of a certain number of prospects and/or customers.
If you use a direct sales force for some of your marketing efforts, you may want to qualify prospects rather than having your salespeople make cold calls. Direct mail can help you identify people who have an interest in your product or service before you send a salesperson to the phones or out on the road.
However, the most common objective for direct mailers is simply to generate sales. They want more people to spend more money on their products and services. While your objectives may change from one campaign to the next, it’s important that you do take the time to identify a quantifiable objective for each of your direct mail efforts. Since the big benefit of direct mail is its measurability, you want to take full advantage of the ability to leverage this benefit through a solid foundation based on specific, quantifiable, and measurable goals. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
1. Will Direct Mail Work for You?
Not everything will prove to be a successful mail-order product. Will your product sell through the mail? The following sections include five important questions to ask before embarking on a direct mail campaign. If you can answer “yes” to each of these questions, there’s a good chance that your campaign can be a successful one.
1.1 Can you reach your market effectively through direct mail?
You will need to consider whether you can reach your market effectively through direct mail. Suppose you’re selling a product that appeals to lawyers. It’s easy enough to get a list of lawyers. You can reach your market. However, suppose you’re selling a product that appeals to 30-year-old redheads who collect stamps. You’re going to have a very tough time finding a list of these prospects (although tools such as Facebook Ads make this more of a possibility than in the past). Even if you were able to find a list of this target group, the number of potential customers will be so small that you may not be able to sell very large quantities of your product.
As we’ll see, in direct mail the list is the most important aspect of your marketing effort. If you can’t reach your market (e.g., if you can’t find a list or enough lists), you can’t sell your product.
Despite the cautions in the following sections, and even though you may not be able to sell every product or service through a direct mail effort, what you can often do is generate qualified leads. Having qualified leads can then become part of your sales pipeline, providing salespeople with names of individuals or companies that have expressed some interest or affinity that suggests they might be a good candidate for a follow-up call or visit.
1.2 Does your product have broad appeal?
Clothing has broad appeal. Everybody wears clothes. Many people buy clothes for fun, or to be fashionable, and these people buy clothes again and again because their old wardrobes become dated, or because they want to have more fun or be more fashionable! Even those who wear clothing strictly for utilitarian purposes need new clothes when theirs wear out. Clothing is also a common gift item.
Again, it gets down to the potential size of your market. The bigger the potential market, the greater the potential for higher volumes of sales. Direct mail is, more than anything, a numbers game.
1.3 Does your product stand out from the crowd?
Direct mail is easy to do, particularly in the digital age. That means that if you have competitors — and just about everybody has competitors — and direct mail is a viable marketing communication option for your product or service, your competitors are likely to be using direct mail as well. So you will need to stand out in some manner from your competition in terms of product quality, price point, access, or service (or some combination of these).
1.4 Can you describe or illustrate your product effectively through direct mail?
Clothing can be sold readily via direct mail because it’s relatively easy to describe or illustrate through photographs. However, selling houses through the mail is more challenging. Why? Because houses are more complex and require more personal involvement on the part of the buyer to make a decision. In fact, the need for involvement tends to increase along with the dollar value of the item being considered for purchase. The higher the cost, the more the consumer will want to have an opportunity to see, examine, experience, and ask questions about the product. That’s more than you can hope to do through a single direct mail effort.
1.5 Can you make a profit?
In the past, if your product sold for less than $15 and you only had one product to sell, you probably wouldn’t be able to justify the cost of a direct mail campaign, which would include the cost of developing, printing, and mailing your direct mail piece as well as the cost of renting a list. Those days are gone, though, thanks to the advent of digital direct mail. In fact, one of the big benefits of email marketing is the low cost, since the cost of print and postage have literally been eliminated.
2. Goals
Determining whether your direct mail effort will be designed to generate sales, leads, or something else is part of the goal-setting process.
Goals are high-level statements of some end result you hope to achieve. Your direct mail goals might be to —
• generate qualified leads,
• increase sales, or
• increase your prospect/mailing list.
Your goal statement simply indicates what it is you hope to achieve with your direct mail effort. You can be more specific in your goal statement by including an indication of the target audience you’re selecting. For example, your statements might include:
• Generate qualified leads in a certain geographic area or among a certain demographic segment.
• Increase sales to new customers, to customers who haven’t purchased over a certain period of time, or to a new category of customers.
• Increase the number of CEOs or purchasing managers who sign up for your mailing list.
Table 1 includes some actual goal statements from direct mail campaigns.
Table 1: Goal Statements from Direct Mail Campaigns
| Type of Business or Service | Goal |
| Dental clinic | Increase new patients. |
| Insurance company | Increase revenue and new clients. |
| Physical therapy services | Raise awareness of practice and increase new patients. |
| Jewelry | Increase attendance and sales at jewelry shows. |
| Party rental |
Gain recognition for the
|
