Today, people receive way less direct mail than they used to. They pay their bills online and most marketers target them through email, social media, digital ads, etc. This leaves a huge opportunity for businesses to reach, engage and convert audiences though direct mail.

If you want to maximize the value of direct mail marketing, you’ll need to do more than just send a quarterly newsletter. Here are your seven tips for success:

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1. Take a fresh look at positioning

Look for ways to convey points of differentiation using short punchy phrases. Consider the phrase “New and Improved.” When used in direct mail it implies a positive change that benefits customers, enticing mail recipients to investigate further.

2. Find a new way to dramatize a feature.

Illustrate the value of your product in a way that’s visual and entertaining. This technique was used to good effect to market the Ginsu knife. (They showed how their knives could cut bread, tomatoes, and tin cans with equal ease.) And remember that today’s direct mail is an easy way to direct your audience to online content, like product videos, downloadable white papers, and coupons.

3. Stop doing projects and setup a program.

There are lots of benefits to developing an ongoing direct mail strategy instead of investing in one-off projects. By taking the program approach, you can look at costs, timelines, and results from a different viewpoint. With advanced planning you can take advantage of postal discounts, value-added services like IMb Track and Trace, and reduce overall costs with postal logistical strategies, like commingling.The mailing experts at Priority Group can help you develop a program to reach your goals.

4. Increase relevance with personalized messaging.

There are lots of ways to create amore relevant marketing message based on audience demographics like gender, age, and past purchases from your company. Digital printing allows you to customize messages, images, and offers with ease. When we inkjet addresses, you can also add personalized messages to the outside of an envelope or a mailer. Our mailing team can also help you with list append services, which add additional information about your audience.

5. Clean up your list with an advanced data hygiene strategy.

Managing your mailing lists helps lower overall mailing costs by eliminating undeliverable names. Options include identifying hard-to-catch duplicate contacts with sophisticated de-duping strategies. We can get returns on bulk mail and create suppression lists. While every list is checked against the USPS National Change of Address (NCOA) list, we can also check addresses against databases. This is a smart strategy for educational institutions where students move away from their parent’s homes, but do not report a change in address to the post office.

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6. A/B test different formats to improve program performance.

Did you know that mail format impacts response rates? In general, large envelopes and postcards tend to perform better than letter-size envelopes. Making even minor format changes can have a huge impact on performance. This could be as simple as changing the size of a postcard from 5.5” x 8.5” to 5.5” x 11”. To plan a test, talk to you Priority Group account executive.

7.  Use IMb Track and Trace to gain visibility into the mail stream.

This low-cost tool lets you know when mail is out for delivery at its destination, so you can better time other aspects of a marketing campaign, like email and online advertising.Coordinating and delivering a consistent message across marketing channels can leave a lasting impact on your audience and encourage more people to convert.

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