Direct Mail: A History – Now And Then

Most of the principles of marketing have been with us for years and years, and in that time what has really changed is the methods. In their number and in their nature, marketing campaigns today are more varied than they ever have been. But they are still linked in to that same old end goal – making people want to buy a product or pay for a service by using persuasion techniques that convince them that that thing is likely to improve their life or give them something extra. Even direct mail, which has overtones of a very modern kind, is something that has been practised for many years.

The core principle of direct mail is that it should cut out the middleman. In so many advertising and marketing campaigns much of the money involved goes to an advertising agency who create the marketing material and often identify where it should be placed. Direct mail is designed to go from the seller to the customer and encourage the customer to spend money on the products and/or services of the seller. There is no agency involved to do this. The aim is that the marketer, or the seller, will reach out to customers without having to spend an undue amount of money and will therefore get a return on their investment.

One of the obvious drawbacks of old-fashioned direct mail – prior to the advent of the Internet, specifically – was that even once you had got to your customer they had to decide to come back to you, and in order to encourage such a physical reaction from a potential customer there needed to be more time devoted to persuasion. Even if the first mailshot got a lot of people’s attention, it may have taken a while longer to get them to commit to returning to you with a view to making a purchase.

The Internet has made for a boost to direct mail campaigns, as the marketer now has the added option of email. If you have a marketing campaign planned and want to get it in the eyeline of the potential customer, it is much easier to do this by sending them an email. Assuming you can persuade them to take notice of the email you can include a link in the body text, which need only be clicked to take the customer to a sales page. From there they can spend their money.

It is not that we are lazy as a species – although some of us are, certainly. The reason that this more instant, more virtual form of direct mail has been such a godsend for marketers is simply that it provides less opportunity for the customer to be distracted or for them to fulfil their need somewhere else. It allows the salesperson to get more quickly to a point where they can close the sale and ring it up. This leaves more time to hone everything else, and is a major reason why direct mail is now more popular than ever.

Building Your Mailing List

Direct marketing is a development that has allowed numerous small businesses to increase their market share without having to go to the often excessive expense of a marketing campaign. By going straight to your customers, you can keep yourself in the eye of your market without having to worry about overstretching yourself financially. In order to do this, you have to build what could be considered a one-on-one relationship with customers – and the ways of doing this are becoming more tried and tested as time goes on.

The first necessity for anyone looking to build a customer relationship that will aid them in the long term is building direct mailing lists. In order to do this it is necessary to get contact information that allows you to go straight to your customer. How you do this is up to you, but a popular way of going about it is to include a section on your business website which allows customers – or potential customers – to sign up for email updates. People are naturally much more ready to give their email address than any other contact information. Although an email address is direct contact information, it is less personal than a telephone number or a home address.

An email contact form on your website is also a good way of getting the required contact information. As a marketer one of your most important tasks is to be receptive to customer requests – and very often, the requests will be for information. You can include a great deal of information on your website, but there is never enough space for all the information your customer may need to know. Some will have very specific requests, which can only be answered with a direct reply. As long as you give this, you have the customer’s confidence, and you can then use that to build a relationship.

Direct mailing lists are indispensable for smaller businesses who want to up their customer share. If you are in direct contact with customers you can inform them immediately of important developments – a special offer, a sale or anything similar – and increase the amount of return business that you get. Additionally, you will gain a reputation for being customer-centered. The value of this cannot be overestimated, as customers today want to know that the business they are dealing with has their interests in mind.

One thing that must be remembered, though, is that direct mailing lists are not an invitation to bombard customers with emails telling them about everything your company is doing, nor to send them “spam” which simply reminds them that you exist. When it comes to sending mass email, the key is always “less is more”. A lot of companies make the mistake of mailing their customers too frequently and all that will happen as a result is that the customer will begin to ignore the email. Do not consider your direct mailing lists to be a reason for sending an email for the sake of it – they are to be used occasionally and at the right time, for the good of your customer retention.

How Email Has Helped Businesses Evolve

The Internet has made a major difference to the way we do business in this day and age. People who never would have considered even starting a business a decade ago are now doing just that because of the increased opportunities the Internet has offered them. A major part of this change has been the way that email works for a business, and in particular the difference between using email for direct mailing and the old way – using the postal service.

Think for a moment about how you used to treat the mail when it arrived in the morning. Any letter that looked “important” would be opened and read, while anything that was obviously marketing content would be thrown in the trash, usually without even reading it. Considering the expense of using the postal service for marketing purposes – the cost of postage, producing the marketing material etc. – this was never really a worthwhile use of time and money, but companies still did it because anything that might create repeat business was considered to be something that had to be done.

With direct mailing having become much easier due to the advent of email, those problems are in the main no longer relevant. Where before you had to pay for the materials used, and often for the design of any marketing material, typing your marketing information into an email is free of charge. Sending it is free, too, and even if a stamp is cheap and you have a deal with a postal service it can really begin to add up when you are writing to a number of people. If, as a conservative estimate, you were to say that it cost $1 per address to write, produce and send marketing material, a single mailshot to a hundred potential customers would cost $100 – less any deal for bulk.

However, as any mathematician will tell you, one hundred times zero equals zero. Therefore direct mailing using the Internet is a much more cost-effective way of getting the message out there. Given that one of the key rules of business is to keep your return on investment high, any sale which results from a direct mailing campaign using email represents a profit. It might be argued that there will be a number of people who do not read their email unless it is from someone specific – but even if someone does that, it didn’t cost any money to send them the mail so it does not represent a financial loss.

Of course, this does not mean that direct mailing will necessarily pay off. There is no doubt that there is an art to doing it correctly, and this tends to separate the successful from the unsuccessful direct mailing campaign. You need to give those customers a reason to read and react without laying it on too thick. Incentivizing repeat customers is an important consideration. This may involve offering them money off for using a particular order code, or developing a reputation for having an entertaining marketing campaign. One way or the other, if you make it work for you direct mailing can be a real money-maker.