What Is Agile Direct Mail and Why Do I Need It?

November 8th, 2017 by

Agile direct mail means creating a direct mail campaign with the intent to be able to quickly adapt it to changing circumstances to stay ahead of the competition.

Many thanks to Summer Gould, President of Eye/Comm Inc. for this amazingly easy to understand guideline to creating an agile direct mail campaign:

Build your roadmap

First you need to build your roadmap. This will consist of three to four direct mail deployments and tracking. Each mailing will highlight a new benefit of your product or service, along with a new offer. After each mailing, check reporting to see what is working and what needs to be changed.

It all comes down to the four basics of agility: Thoughts/ideas, Questions, Decisions and Actions. Then, I like to add my four basic: testing, tweaking, changing creative, reviewing the offer.

Mailing 1: Design and mail your first drop. Be sure to include multiple ways to respond and track your responses.

Mailing 2: Look at the responses from the first mailing. What worked? Keep that. What needs improvement? Make changes to design and the offer. Then, mail your second drop with the ability to track your responses.

Mailing 3: Check responses, not only from Mailing No. 2, but also in comparison to the first one. You should see an improvement. Again, you will need to make changes that help to improve your responses.

Mailing 4: You should now see a clear pattern emerging. You can use this to make changes to enhance this mailing’s appeal and, thereby, response.

Reviewing Your Results & Making Changes

The key to agile direct mail  is consistent mailing over time, with constant vigilance on what is working and what needs Agile Direct Mailimprovement. There are no excuses for not tracking your responses. If you have no idea if something is working, you have no reason to send another one. You are just wasting your money. You and your team need to constantly be having conversations. It’s not just about what you are doing, but about what the competition is doing, too. What new ideas are you coming up with? Where can you find inspiration?

Constantly feeding the conversation about your direct mail campaigns will keep agile thinking top of mind.

One key thing to be careful of, especially if you have been doing direct mail for a long time, is assumptions. What are your assumptions about direct mail? How are they blocking you from seeing a better way? You can try listing all of the facts you think of about direct mail, and then challenge someone else on your team to provide facts that contradict what you thought. This can help you see beyond your own assumptions to ideas you never thought possible. There are many opportunities with direct mail that you may not have considered before.

Don’t be afraid to fail. With agile direct mail, even if you don’t get the first result you were hoping for, it’s not a failure. Think of it as an experience to build a better mail piece the next time around. Every direct mail piece you send tells you something. Use that information to build better and better campaigns. Agility will get you to success much faster than you have before.

 

*This information on agile direct mail first appeared via Target Marketing*  I have done a little editing of my own.

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