We all love a direct mail success story.
I want to tell you about a call I received from MaryBeth McCabe at the Sun-Sentinel Direct. She shared some good news about a particular direct mailing. The offer was a $1.5 Million dollar home in an upscale golfing community which was being auctioned off. Of course, my job was to create the perfect list.
The auction bidding started at $400,000. We needed to make sure we were reaching out to the right prospect group. Our instructions were to locate highly affluent avid golfers in the area. The client felt local homeowners would best know the benefits of this particular country club community, We also wanted to make sure they could afford to participate in the auction.
We used existing homeowners from our Property Owners Database. In terms of our demographic selects, we pulled age 45-75, income $200,000+, current home value $500,000+, length of residence 3-5 years. This was overlaid with Golfer data from the Behavior Bank database. We selected the zip-codes surrounding this area. Last, we also omitted the client’s own list, which included current members in that particular county club community. After all, there was no reason to spend marketing dollars mailing to them.
Total quantity mailed was 4,200 pieces.
The mailing list generated the right interest for the auction and the home was sold! That’s a great direct mail success story.
Why am I sharing this with you?
Right now, one of our primary jobs as marketeers is to convince our clients to keep mailing. It’s a shame that many advertisers think direct mail is not for them. Obviously they’re not tuned in to what’s working in today’s market.
We need to keep communicating the beauty of direct marketing to our clients. The importance of omni-channel communication. They can take that same mailing list and append email addresses where they are available. This way, they can reach the same prospects digitally with the same message.
And, let’s not forget USPS Informed Delivery. Another opportunity to maximize reach to the same prospects. And we all know how important it is to reach the same people with the same message through multiple marketing channels. The USPS has lots of direct mail success stories on their website, if you want to read them.
There is no question that Direct Marketing is the most cost-effective way to target a specific prospect group with an appropriate message and get Results.
When you sit down with your clients, you need to help them define their best prospects. Ask alot of questions. I know it’s sometimes like pulling teeth to get a client to really explain what they’re doing. Iterate who they want to reach and why. This is something that MaryBeth did successfully with her client. You must also encourage them to use real offers that encourage response. Believe me, in today’s market, wishy-washy offers will be ignored. Be pro-active and suggest that your clients suppress their own customers from prospect mailings to eliminate wasted dollars. This will also further stretch their outreach. Again, MaryBeth made this happen as well.
Small, finely-targeted mailings work.
And, mailing multiple times to a well-defined prospect group is way better than mailing to a larger less-fine-tuned list of prospects.