Direct Mail « Direct Marketing and Databases

Direct Mail

Experienced marketers know that direct mail provides key benefits as part of an integrated campaign. You too can benefit from the key strengths of direct mail:

The ability to target key decision makers by name and personalise communications to them
Creative flexibility, with print and production technologies offering far more possibilities than a simple standard A4 or A5 pack
High recall for mailers that are well produced
People have a tendency to keep items of interest for later consideration
The room to explain complex propositions, or guide readers through a wide range of available options
The potential to achieve some of the highest response rates of all marketing activities and the ability to easily measure results

OMG BrandScience research in December 2009 shows direct mail to be the only advertising channel registering consistent growth in its effectiveness over the past four years - up 80 per cent based on a response performance index - and also the only one to show an increase in response rates in 2009. The research also shows mail’s ability to improve performance of other marketing activities - with digital campaigns seeing a 62% increase in return on investment when combined with direct mail.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, (2009), more than 30% of direct mail recipients go online to respond to direct mail. This response rate is increased by 20% to 30% when personalised URLs are included on the text of the mailer.

Planning a direct mailing campaign

Every great campaign starts with a plan. And, like any marketing activity, planning your direct mail campaign is critical in ensuring its success. Planning involves a number of steps including setting your campaign objectives, defining your target audience, creating the offer, designing the mailer (what will make someone stop for that extra second and consider what you are saying rather than your competitor…) agreeing the budget, and setting up measurements to evaluate the success once the responses have all come in.

Golden Data can help you with every stage in the planning process, or simply manage the whole process for you.

Handling responses

Once you have mailed your offer to potential clients and given them various ways of responding, you have to deal with that response. This could be by capturing data, sending out brochures, conducting phone calls for telemarketing or full sales activities.

Time is often the critical element here since a business which responds to a mailer shot is interested in your products or services and it is important to interact with them at this stage. However the resources required to capture these responses, which can be high soon after the direct mail goes out, are not always available. Golden Data can manage all of the activities associated with response handling to let you get on with running your daily activities.

Our services include:

Inbound call handling
Lead generation
Telemarketing
Telesales
Full response handling service