Steven Sellwood asked:


More and more businesses are facing an uncertain future due to the current economic situation, so growing numbers are looking for cost effective ways to drum up new business.

Running a direct marketing campaign is one way of attracting new customers to help protect your business in 2009. The New Year is always a popular time to run a direct marketing or mailing campaign, but it’s never too soon to start your planning and preparations. So here’s a checklist of everything you should do to ensure success:

1. Decide on your offer.

Think carefully about what your direct marketing campaign is going to promote, and who you want to target. The most successful mailings contain some kind of offer or incentive as a spur to action, so see if you have a product line you can offer at a discount, a sales promotion available, or even a freebie you can offer.

Whatever your offer, make sure it’s going to appeal to the people you are going to target. They could be enquirers who have never ordered, customers who’ve not ordered for a long time, small customers who you want to upsell, or even prospects you’ve never contacted before. Link your offer to the action you want your audience to carry out.

2. If you’ve got your own mailing list, get it cleaned.

Mailing inaccurate data is wasteful, costly and unprofessional. It doesn’t matter if it’s a list of businesses or consumers, there are a range of regularly updated suppression files against which your list can be compared and cleaned. You can screen for recent registrations with the Telephone Preference Service or Mailing Preference Service, identify changes of address or even people who have deceased. There are many data cleansing services available ranging from full bureau for larger lists to easy desktop solutions like Easycheck.

3. If your list is incomplete, fill the gaps.

Incomplete data can cause delivery problems which increases wastage. Data records can often be incomplete due to data entry errors, and may lack fields like postcode, contact name, telephone or email address. If you have a fairly small list, then try contacting people on the list to verify that their details are accurate. If you have a larger list or don’t have complete contact details, then it is sometimes possible to have your data enhanced by cross referencing it with other files.

4. If you don’t have a list, find a good one.

A good quality list is at the heart of every successful direct marketing campaign. If you don’t have your own, there are literally hundreds of lists available, from large consumer and business lists covering the whole of the UK, to locally targeted lists of new business start ups in your area from Startupsplus, or local consumers about to celebrate a birthday from the Birthday Mailings list. Whatever list you choose, look at the source of the data and how it was collected, how often it’s cleaned, the selection criteria available, usage restrictions, and of course pricing or single for multiple use. And it goes without saying that you should only ever buy a list from a reputable supplier who is a member of the Direct Marketing Association.

5. Don’t let your mailer let you down.

It’s surprising how many businesses fall at the last hurdle by sending out a mailshot that looks unprofessional and gets little response. Sometimes a mailing can be seen as a good opportunity to use up old literature or last year’s brochure, or what’s going in the envelope can be completely overlooked until the very last minute. There’s plenty of advice available about what to include in a good mailer, and plenty of creative design agencies ready to help you create something stunning. But generally speaking you can’t go wrong with a well written and personally addressed letter with a clear call to action on it, an accompanying professionally designed leaflet, and a nice quality overprinted envelope to send it all in.

6. Don’t be a one hit wonder.

Sometimes you need to repeat your message several times to get a response. One big mailing followed by nothing may mean you miss out on additional business. That’s why direct marketing campaigns are often staggered into teaser, offer and follow up mailings. Better still, reinforce your mailing by repeating your offer or message through other promotional channels at the same time. Change your website home page and pay per click advertising, carry out email marketing, get editorial coverage or place advertising in industry or regional press, and brief your field sales staff, reps or engineers. Then when that’s all done, plan to follow up the mailing by telephone (as long as your leads aren’t registered with the TPS or CTPS of course).

7. Plan for a good response.

Don’t let your valuable enquiries go to waste, just because your switchboard can’t cope with the sudden influx of calls, or you’ve run out of stock. Brief all your staff on the campaign, and what information they need to give if they should answer an enquiry. Ensure any follow-up literature or samples are ready to be sent, and that you’ve got plenty of stocks of the product line you’ve just put on offer.

8. Measure, measure and measure again.

Keep records of all enquiries and leads from your direct marketing campaign, ideally on a daily basis. Next to this data make a note of when key events took place like when different mailings hit or follow ups took place. With this invaluable data to hand you’ll be able to analyse to your heart’s content, identifying key measures like conversion rates, cost per acquisition and cost per order. After a while you’ll start to spot important trends like a certain combination of offers or mailings working particularly well, or a peak time of the week for responses. Then you can keep your campaign going for longer or plan better campaigns in the future by further mining these seams of success.



Destiny Marquez

Lalita N asked:


If you have a fine dining restaurant or an online e-commerce store, email marketing campaign is always a handy for accumulating traffic for any website. No matter what kind of business you run, driving traffic is the cornerstone of obtaining Your product or services will be far easier to sell when you build relationship with your customers. Email marketing campaign assists in developing bonding with customers whether new or existing ones.

Being an online entrepreneur, you are able to understand selling products to existing or even better, loyal customers is much easier than selling to new group of customers. Loyal or old customers are easy to predict as you already are familiar about their expectations from different types of products or services. And email marketing services even help knowing these customers’ likes and dislikes, changing demands etc., and their budget to spend on your products, benefits they are looking for and many more.

Like an online entrepreneur finds more convenient and easier to sell their products or services to loyal or existing customers, your old customers feel same way when it comes to buying goods. They feel much more comfortable in picking up products they need from a known online store they have been using to purchase than trying new shops. Therefore, once a customer uses your website may likely to return to your site again if you are able to promote and prolong your relationship well with them an email marketing campaign is used for this purpose as it is effective enough in retaining old client base.

First and the most basic ingredient required for turning new customers into old customers is content of the email marketing campaign. Find out those topics which are most sought after by your customers. Invest quality time in type of articles, blogs and web based information your customers are most intrigued to read. Therefore, develop own and original content to your subscribers. Another way to allure new customers to become a regular buyers is by slashing subscription rates especially for your existing customers to make them feel special and save their pockets too. Encourage your customers to write comments and feedbacks on your newsletters while they respond to your newsletters and visit your sites.



Ali Frye

Marc Steel asked:


It appears to be a common trend nowadays to say that direct mail campaigns are dead. The development of the Internet has certainly left many more avenues of marketing open but those who suggest direct mailing is dead simply are not implementing their campaign efficiently.

Direct mail campaigns are all about trial and error. Try something, measure the impact, if it doesn’t work try something else next time. You need to work out the best ways to reach your target market and the best way to gain a response. Having worked in a company which bases itself upon direct mail campaigns, there are a number of options available.

The first and perhaps most important item to remember is control. For every mailing campaign there also needs to be a control group (i.e. customers that do not receive the mail). It is then quite easy to measure whether or not the mailing is having an impact or if those who did not receive a mailing are responding anyway. By comparing the two groups it is relatively straightforward to see whether the mailing campaign has produced any significant effect on your profit margins. For example, the group who were mailed may have showed no noteworthy increase in spend compared to the control group meaning that the campaign will need to be thought through.

Secondly, direct mailing campaigns need to be tracked on a month by month basis. For example, if a customer is part of your campaign in January and showed an increased spend because of this, how much are they still spending in October? Does your mailing campaign have longevity. Between these times it is more than likely that you would have launched further campaigns which have temporarily increased spend again. It is vital that customers are constantly made to be aware of your company. This to not to say that they need to be bombarded with mail but simply be kept up-to-date with special offers or big news from your industry. The more they see your name, the more likely they are to recall it when they do need something.

Thirdly, all customers who are to be included in your campaign need to be split up into adequate groups. It is quite unlikely that you will want to send the same sort of mailing to someone who spent with you last month and someone who spent a year ago for example. Perhaps you will want to send those who haven’t spent for a year some kind of offer (like 10% off) whereas those who spent recently don’t require an offer but just the latest products on offer.

Naturally all customers like to receive discounts and these can differ depending on your company. You could offer a percentage off, a monetary value, free delivery of goods or a free gift for example.

Another good idea is to target specific postal areas. You could try saturating a postal area a little further away from the company base who have possibly not heard of the company before. If this is successful you can then perhaps try other areas. There are also a number of companies who can produce lists of certain demographics which are available for purchase. For example, if you are a wholesaler of ironmongery, you might want a list of all construction firms within 100 miles of you. These lists will take you instantly to your target market.

An obvious way to measure the success of campaigns is to ask the customers. Wherever possible, ask them how they heard about the company. Get them to fill in feedback forms saying what they believe to be both positive and negative about the company. They will soon let you know if they don’t like to be mailed!

These are the basic ideas to any direct mailing campaign but the best way to learn is through experience. The more campaigns you run, the more proficient you will become and the better results will follow.

For further articles like this please visit my website. Click my name at the top of this page



Mason Sweeney