How to Plan Your Direct Marketing Campaign Using Leaflet Delivery and Direct Mail.
Any good marketing campaign should start with a plan. Learn How to plan your next direct marketing campaign using direct mail and leaflet distribution.
Like any marketing action, planning your leaflet delivery campaign is essential in meeting the success of your direct mail results.
Any good campaign should start with a plan. Learn How to plan your next direct marketing campaign using direct mail and leaflet distribution.
Planning involves a number of steps including setting your campaign objectives, through to defining your target audience, creating the offer, agreeing the budget, and setting up measurements to evaluate the success once the responses have all come in.
If it sounds over-whelming, it shouldn’t. A little time spent at the start of the campaign to plan, will ensure you get the best results at the end.
- Set realistic objectives
- Define your ideal target audience
- Compile your own Business database
- Create an irresistible offer
- Set up the Call to Action and Response
- Work out the marketing budget and ROI
- Plan the campaign timing and consider seasonality
- Put measurable actions in place for analysis
- Incorporate campaign testing using variation and version testing
DIRECT MAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES
What do you want to achieve with your direct mail marketing campaign?
The best start you can give to any campaign is to set clear objectives right at the start, and give yourself something to measure your success against later. What do you expect to achieve? Is it direct sales, sales leads, or are you trying to improve customer loyalty?
Whatever you decide, you must be single-minded in constructing your campaign to achieve this objective.
Some examples of direct mail objectives:
- To generate 200 new sales leads over 8 weeks
- To get 300 people to visit my store and redeem the coupon
- To have 50 prospects call our office to set up a meeting
- To cross-sell product XYZ to 300 customers
- To have 100 people download our report from our website
IDEAL TARGET AUDIENCE
Who do you want to target and Who is your business ideal target audience?
Define your target market as precisely as you can. Precise targeting will improve your response rates and your return on investment by only sending your campaign to people most likely to respond, making better use of your marketing budget.
Not all customers are the same. Rather than send your entire customer base a direct mail campaign, identify specific customer groups and target accordingly.
What do your current customers have in common? Look at demographics such as age, gender, income and geographic location. New customers will likely come from the same demographics.
Consumer Demographics criteria
- Gender
- Age
- Lifestyle
- Education
- Household Income
- Location
- Purchasing behaviour
Business Demographics criteria
- Industry type
- Number of employees
- Job title/seniority of contact
- Revenue/turnover
In addition to demographic criteria, identify customer value. High value customers should be recognised and rewarded, while low value customers can be encouraged to become high value.
WORK WITH AND CONSULT YOUR BUSINESS DATABASE FIRST
What information do you have or need to target your audience?
The database is the most important part of any direct mail campaign. No matter how cleverly worded, how beautifully produced or how strong the offer is, if you are not talking to the right people you’re not going to succeed. Conversely, if your database is absolutely spot-on, you are well on your way.
Every company has a list of their own customers and this is one of your most valuable assets. It costs on average six times more to acquire a new customer than to keep one you already have, so sorting out your own customer database is a top priority.
MAKE AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER
What are you offering and why should the target audience like it?
The beauty of direct mail is that you know enough about your audience to be able to make a personalised offer that they will be interested in reading about.
Every good direct mail campaign should have an offer that is relevant to the audience, contributes to your business objectives, creates excitement and a sense of urgency, and is easy for people to take action or redeem.
There are a variety of offers you can create for your target audience. From discounts, early bird offers and special introductory prices to competitions, free gifts and samples, and free reports or whitepapers for business customers.
Make sure you take advantage of testing offers with your customer base to find out which work better. For example, some businesses find that offering a monetary discount (€20) versus a percentage discount (20%) can significantly increase the response rate.
If you are unable to create your own offer, consider working with another company to participate in your mailing. For example, by teaming up with a travel agent, you could offer a free holiday voucher with purchase of your product.
If offering your existing customers a price discount doesn’t make sense, there are plenty of other ways to get more value from your existing customers:
Recommend a friend offers
Offer your current customers an incentive to introduce their friends or family to your business. For example, a local gym could offer existing members a class voucher for every friend they encourage to join the club.
Loyalty programmes
Customers appreciate rewards that are tailored to their shopping preferences and enjoy benefiting from enhanced discounts and member only perks. Reward your best customers for spending money with you.
Cross-sell and up-sell offers
Look at what other complementary products or services can you offer your customer. For example, if you sell car insurance, why not make them an offer on home insurance? Or, why not offer your customer a good reason to upgrade their current product to the next in the range?
RESPONSE AND CALL-TO-ACTION
How do you want people to respond?
Every direct mail campaign must have a ‘call to action’ to drive your audience to act on receipt on the mailing. For example, asking them to call or directing them to a website is a simple way of getting them to look at more information about you.
The more options you offer your audience to respond, the better, and always make your ‘call to action’ as strong as you can.
Channels you can offer your customer to respond:
- phone (use a 1850, 1800 or lo-call number)
- post
- email
- driving customers/prospects in-store (e.g. test drive or a coupon)
- website
Make responding as easy as possible. For example, you could include an order form for your customer to tear off and return, a pre-printed business reply envelope with Freepost address or a link to an online form or landing page on your website.
To help measure which response channel worked best, set up a unique campaign email address or phone number.
Use your response channel as a way to capture more information about your customers. You could include a short questionnaire or competition, or an option for customer to update their details.
MARKETING CAMPAIGN BUDGET AND ROI
What should be the overall direct marketing budget for the campaign?
A direct mail campaign is one of most cost-effective ways to market your business. But how much should you spend on leaflet distribution? The answer depends not simply on how much you have available, but also on the profit or benefit you expect to get out of it.
Firstly, consider the value that one sale will make to your business (now and in the future). For example, if one sale is worth €50 in profit and you’re mailing 1,000 prospects, then a response of 2% will generate €1,000 in additional profits (20 sales x €50).
Now work out what you might invest in your direct mail campaign. The campaign can be broken into the following components:
- Creative costs – you might use a professional to develop the copywriting and/or graphic design of your campaign.
- Printing costs – printing costs for the letter, brochure, envelope can be kept down if you keep the design simple and produce them on large quantities.
- Personalisation and Fulfilment – mailing houses charge for personalising letters and packing letters into envelopes but if you can print your campaign in-house, you can personalise and pack it in-house too.
- Database expenses – Database rental and database cleaning can be expensive, tru and work with current database you have on your business.
- Mailing postage – Postage is often the most expensive part of any direct mail campaign but with unadressed leaflet distribution you can cut the costs on printing, mailing, fulfilment and postage.
- Response budget – Depending on the response mechanism you want to use, include and amount for telephone set up costs, reply envelopes, postage and website landing page creation.
Allocate your budget to each of the above elements to calculate your total investment.
Ensure you are working towards achieving a positive return on investment:
Total investment ÷ value of one sale = number of customers required to respond
For example, if the total investment is €600 to target 1,000 customers, and the value of one sale is €50 – then to achieve a positive return on investment, we will need to gain at least 12 new customers or a 1.2% response.
This is a basic ROI calculation. A more accurate reflection on the success of your campaign would take into account/client Lifetime Value too.
DIRECT MARKETING CAMPAIGN TIMINGS
When is the campaign going to launch?
A direct mail campaign can be ready and mailed within a day to a few months depending on the size and complexity of the campaign.
If you are sending a simple letter or leaflet to your customers, then it is only a matter of writing the letter or printing the flyer and leafletdistributiondublin.com delivering it through the letterbox. Or, if you are intending on a more dynamic pack that includes an elaborate offer it is easy for a project to run for several weeks.
What’s important is to choose the best possible timing for your campaign, consider seasonality, create deadlines and stick to them.
For example, if you’re targeting business customers, avoid sending your campaign just before a bank holiday. Why not do the leaflet delivery in advance of key financial points in the year so that your message arrives when budgets are being planned.
Think about whether you’re going to target everyone at once, or deliver a portion a week at a time to help manage responses. There’s nothing worse than a customer responding but not able to get through as customer service is overloaded!
DIRECT MAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS
How are you going to measure the success of the campaign?
Always look back to your objectives. The purpose of leaflet distribution is ultimately to drive sales and encourage new business.
There are a variety of metrics to evaluate the success of your direct mail marketing campaign including the response rate, cost per customer, lifetime value per customer, and break-even point.
However campaign success is ultimately measured by the return on investment (ROI). And, the most accurate ROI calculation takes into account a customer’s lifetime value, or the amount of sales generated by that customer over time.
Establishing accurate measurement tools such as promotion codes, vouchers or coupons cannot be overlooked when designing your direct mail campaign. Without them, you cannot truly determine if, and to what extent, your efforts were successful.
For example, ask your customer to mention the coupon or read a promotion code when they sign up. Keep track each time a customer mentions or reads the code so that you can be sure they were responding to your letter, versus signing up on their own. The code should appear close to the call to action to make it easy for the respondent to find and quote.
MARKETING CAMPAIGN MULTIPLE VERSION TESTING
What are you going to test?
Testing gives you the opportunity to find out your best audience and what offers generate the greatest response.
You can test your audience by buying a small quantity of names from different lists and coding them accordingly. Then when you find which list responds best, you can buy more names from the same source.
Similarly you can test different offers (e.g. €10 off, 15% free, free calculator) to gauge response. Remember that any offer must be relevant to your audience.
The reason you want to test is because of what you’ll learn from it for the next time. If one offer shines more than another then you know that this is the offer to use in future.
You can also test different creative packs, different response mechanisms (phone vs. post vs. email) and different timings.
Ideally you should test as often as you can, because every time you do you might find an even better way to improve response and sales. So keep the testing cycle going and track your results over time. You’ll improve your response rates and return on investment.
How to Plan Your Direct Marketing Campaign Using Leaflet Delivery and Direct Mail
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