6 Tips to Ensure Direct Mail Avoids Junk Mail

Direct mail is a great way for you to spread the word about your business and increase sales. Direct mail also drives more traffic to your website, and as a result, more people sign up for your mailing list. How do you ensure your direct mail avoids being tossed out as junk mail? Here are a few tips:

12 Steps to an Effective Direct Mail Campaign

Direct mail campaigns still remain a key tool in the overall marketing plans of many businesses. When planned, executed and refined correctly, they can be a very effective way of gaining visibility with tangible and measurable results.

Here are 12 strategies for optimizing your efforts:

11 Direct Mail Marketing Secrets

Remember when getting a letter in the mail was exciting? So do we. But how do you recreate that feeling and get customers excited about your business when they’re facing a sea of junk mail, flyers and credit card offers?

We asked 11 members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) their top secrets for making direct mail marketing more appealing to the people who matter most — those opening the envelopes.

“What is one way brands can make direct mail marketing more appealing to potential (and current) customers?”

5 Best Practices for Direct Mail Campaigns

With the increased saturation of digital marketing and the decreasing volume of direct mailing, people are more likely to respond to a well-executed and relevant direct mail campaign. Since I’m interested in all things marketing, I thought it would be helpful to review this new-again marketing technique and explore some best practices. I found some surprising stats, as well as useful parallels to digital marketing.

4 Reasons to Use Direct Mailing This Holiday Season

In fact, direct mail has the highest rate for gaining new customers: 34%, leading email at 25% and search engine marketing at 10% success, according to Target's Marketing Media Usage Forecast. If the numbers aren't enough, read on to discover why direct mail marketing is a great option for your business.

10 Direct Mail Secrets

For the past decade, many business owners have regarded direct mail as the ugly stepsister of print or broadcast advertising. Loud, misleading and cluttered pieces mailed anonymously to millions of prospects only served to reinforce this perception.

Strategy: Direct Marketing on a Shoestring Budget

Many business owners (or mid-sized business marketers) are always aghast at the budget required to market their products/services. In direct marketing in particular, ever-rising postal costs, printing and even data management sticker shock can stop a project in its tracks.

The question is: How can you best use your precious marketing budget to accomplish the most? The answer is to work smarter, not harder:

5 Roles Making Waves in Direct Marketing

The evolution of direct marketing over the past several years has led to an emergence of new roles and new expectations for current ones. “Marketers have never had to know so much,” says Jerry Bernhart, founder of Bernhart Associates Executive Search, which specializes in marketing, e-commerce, and CRM. “There are just so many moving pieces to modern marketing. You need someone who is data savvy [and] analytic; someone who has a proven track record of growing a business; someone who's a financial steward; and someone who's a marketing technologist. It's the land of a thousand niches.”

Direct Mail Has a Greater Effect on Purchase Than Digital Ads

An in-depth neuroscientific study sponsored by the Postal Service Inspector General's office (OIG) found direct mail ads to be superior to those viewed online in eight out of nine categories. Digital ads seized the attention of consumers quicker, but physical ads held that attention longer, elicited a greater emotional reaction, and played a more direct role in ultimate purchase decisions.

12 Steps to an Effective Direct Mail Campaign

Direct mail campaigns still remain a key tool in the overall marketing plans of many businesses. When planned, executed and refined correctly, they can be a very effective way of gaining visibility with tangible and measurable results.

Here are 12 strategies for optimizing your efforts:

Is Direct Mail Dying? 3 Effects on Marketing

Multi-channel marketers have been debating the lifespan of direct mail ever since the United States Postal Service revealed an accelerated drop in mail volume back in the early days of the recession. The debate is more relevant than it’s ever been today as cheaper, more efficient options spring up seemingly overnight.

10 best practices for direct mail

Direct mail should be considered an essential part of an integrated marketing strategy. It delivers the high level of personalization today’s customers demand, it provides proven response triggers that drive the target into action and it’s the right media to tell an information-rich story in a compelling way.To understand the full potential of direct mail, here is a list of 10 direct mail best practices that Jacobs & Clevenger employs to optimize the effectiveness of our clients’ direct marketing campaigns.

Email and Direct Mail Are Not on Opposing Teams

A common challenge for CMO’s is getting their email marketers to acknowledge that there still is a direct mail group alive and well within their company. 

Meanwhile, according to the DMA, many marketers are reporting a dramatically higher response rate to direct mail than they did in the 1980’s. Yet, direct mail is not perfect: it is not instantaneous on either delivery or feedback, it requires multiple steps to execute, and if used unwisely (last week’s blog) it can be expensive. 

How to: Be Successful with Direct Marketing

I don’t care what they say, print marketing is not dead. It is easy to get carried away with the instant gratification of Facebook, the tracking abilities of e-mail marketing, or the ease of a blog post, but there is still something to be said about direct mail. For as many millennials there are monopolizing marketers’ attention, there is also a huge population of the public who do not participate in social media or check their email 60 times a day… people who value a tangible print piece. There is always room to subsidize your digital marketing efforts with good ol’ fashioned print, and here are some key points to keep in mind and implement for the most effective print piece possible.

Direct Mail Goes Digital

Direct Mail has been inseparable from technology since the days of the earliest database-driven campaigns. The marketing mix has changed dramatically since then, with an explosion of digital channels—but direct mail remains one of the most effective hands-on tools to reach customers and spur prompt action. “When you want someone to attend an event, make a phone call, or do anything with higher touch, you still see people go back to physical mail,” says Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Even in the Digital Age, Why Direct Mail Is Still a Viable Marketing Tactic

We’ve always known that Canada produces delicious food, from maple syrup to poutine, and hilarious comedians, from John Candy to Mike Myers. Now, our friends to the north have made another important contribution, this time to the world of modern marketing.

Direct Mail: Why A/B Test?

This is a very common question that our clients ask, especially the smaller ones. They need to know if an A/B test is something they should do. The easy answer is “yes,” because it allows you to try out different offers to see which ones work best.

3 Ways Direct Mail Marketing Lowers Cost Per Lead for a Higher Conversion Rate

If you feel you’re spinning your wheels with digital marketing, you may want to back up and take the tried-and-true direct mail marketing route. Most digital marketing evangelists will scoff at direct mail, but two very important truths remain: direct mail yields a higher conversion rate than all other marketing types except for telephone, as well as the lowest cost per lead.

The Direct Mail Advantage

Does a less crowded mailbox translate to a better response? The answer is that it may not. You still need the right list, the right design and the right offer. When you do all of this and the mailbox is less full, you do have an advantage. Not only does your piece stand out more, but recipients are more curious about what is in the mail. That translates to spending more time looking at your marketing materials. Another thing to note: studies have shown that consumers spend more time with direct mail and remember it better than digital marketing. Are you taking advantage of the benefits offered via Direct Mail?

Direct Mail Effectiveness Statistics

In the digital age, direct mail marketing can still be an effective way to promote a message. Tangible mail can actually be more effective than email marketing, because the reader cannot simply click and delete the item but must first look it over. If the mail appeals to the reader, he likely will open it. There are many statistics that validate this effectiveness.

Why Direct Mail Still Yields the Lowest Cost-Per-Lead and Highest Conversion Rate

These days, marketing is all about digital. We are emailing, blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking our little marketeer hearts out.  So direct mail (the kind that the postal delivery person puts in your mailbox, remember?) must be dead in the water. Right?

5 Reasons Why Direct Mail is an Effective Marketing Tool

With the advanced capabilities and highly penetrated use of email and other online channels like video and social media, you may ask… Is Direct Mail still effective? You may even be wondering if the cost is worth it?