Creating a great direct mail piece takes time, effort, and skill, here at Fingertips Typing Services we pride ourselves on delivering exceptional direct and email marketing campaigns for our clients that engage their customers, create desire, and ultimately deliver sales.

But what does a good mail campaign look like, this blog post explores best practice so that you too can takes at least deliver great results.

Our best practice tips:

1. Identify your market – Where will you be sending your campaigns and why? The narrower your target audience, the more effective your campaign will be because your message and offer will resonate more clearly.
2. Data, data, data – The most important thing about a direct mail or email campaign is ensuring that you have a clean and up-to-date database of customers. Without that you have no way of knowing whether the offers or communications that you are sending your customers are relevant.
3. Focus your message on benefits: Ensure that your copywriting includes the benefits most valuable to the consumer rather than the features of your product or service. Most consumers value cost, peace of mind, convenience, and quality.
4. Targeting and Personalisation – These two things are crucial to your success. Where possible define your customer segments, enabling you to send more personalised offers and content that is likely to resonate with them, this will generate you more sales. Personalisation isn’t just about putting their name on the email or direct mail piece it is about connecting you to your customer, so use their previous purchasing behaviour to highlight what products could be of interest to them.
5. Ensure the campaign is not stand alone – A single mailing does not make a campaign, in fact it has been tried and tested that four direct mail touches to elicit the behaviour you want. So be prepared to send multiple waves of offers and where possible use an A/B test to maximise your efforts and learn more about your customers.
6. Call to action – Make sure that these are clear, compelling, and repeated. A good call to action will tell your customer what you want them to do and reiteration is important your success as it is human nature to skim read emails so making the call to action clear and visible multiple times is extremely important.
7. Provide Multiple Ways to Respond – Removing as much friction as possible is important to ensuring your customers engage with you. So be sure to accommodate various communication preference a not everyone wants to email. Include as many ways as possible for customers to respond including: By mail, order-form inserts, coupons that can be used in-person and online, phone numbers, email, online shop, QR codes or URLs to an offer landing page.
8. Information Is key – Direct Mail recipients spend more time reading physical mail item than those who do digitally. This is because we look at a piece of paper very differently from a screen, so if you are using this method, ensure that you provide more information. Include good imagery, have a clear call to action and highlight the benefits that your customers will find valuable. Avoid talking about features of a product and instead highlight the benefits.
9. Include Testimonials – This is a good way of social-proofing your expertise, including customer testimonials is a great way to highlight your benefits and show your customers what they can expect to get from your service or product. These work best when you have a picture of the customer who has provided it.

Email and direct mail are both extremely effective when they are used properly, our list of tips is not finite, I could talk endlessly on this subject but by following our nine simple steps you will deliver excellent results. But it’s important to remember that these campaigns are not stand alone and should be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts.

For more information on our mailshot services visit https://www.fingertipstyping.co.uk/mailshots/