Direct Mail:Selling Your Way to Success

In order to understand direct mail you must first understand the essential difference between advertising and selling. Advertising reaches people you do not know, and potentially makes them prospects for sales. Selling is actually turning people from prospects into buyers. Direct mail is best used for selling and not advertising.

Direct mail can be quite expensive in terms of the cost involved to reach a specific amount of people. If some of the cost involved in direct mail is "wasted reach" it can become prohibitively expensive. Many of the costs associated with direct mail such as postage, printing, and paper costs, have skyrocketed upward making this once very cheap promotional vehicle too expensive for any but those with a well-qualified prospect list. In order to reach hot prospects you must pay for an exceptional list, or devote your own resources to building your own house list.

A whole industry surrounds building and maintaining direct mailing lists. Most communities have a local or regional list service, plus local contacts for national companies like Dun & Bradstreet Information Services and Metromail. You need to look in your Yellow Pages under "mailing lists” to see what is offered before “winging it” with your own direct mail list building campaign.

These companies compile lists of individuals, households and various businesses, and then provide selections based upon specific criteria, for additional costs. The amount of criteria involved and specificity of the list will determine the cost involved. For example, a list of households within a specific ZIP code area with a licensed driver and children in school, would be a list qualified by three specific criteria of data compiled from postal, transportation and school records, and would be sorted to arrive at your desired list for your direct mail campaign. If you then added additional criteria such as specific earning requirements, the number of data sorts would then increase again, increasing the amount of cost as well as reducing the names on your list.

However, you have to consider many different factors to determine whether your direct mail investment is really worth it. If you are improving the specific targeting of your list, you are also improving its value. A basic list sorted by three or more criteria may cost a minimum of $200-$300 plus the additional cost of $70-$100 for every thousand names. If you add additional sort criteria, the cost continues to spiral as well as focusing the targeting aspect of your list. How focused do you want to get for your direct mail campaign? Many experts state that the more specialized your direct mail offering, the more important it will be to target your list to improve your level of direct mail success.

Direct mail can and does work, especially when having a really good match between your promotional offer and a well targeted list. Do not go into it blindly. Lead times are known to be long and production budgets may be steep. The main factor involving whether you should pursue direct mail as a promotional vehicle is, how good and how expensive is your list?

Some information from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Basics by Sarah White

Additional Information and webpage by Paul Susic M.A. Licensed Psychologist CEO/President Susic Psychological Consulting P.C.