Great products can make each other better and raise both businesses to new heights. By combining forces with another company, you can pool your resources, create selling synergies and ultimately reach a bigger audience—and reap the benefits.

The first step to boosting the signal of your direct mail campaign is to find companies and organizations whose products complement yours. For instance, let’s say you’re a mortgage company. Why not reach out to Realtor organizations to create a piece that shows how their real estate agents can help you find a great home while your mortgage company can make it an achievable dream? Or a travel agency might team up with a specific resort or airline to highlight a specific promotion.

Let’s look at just a few of the benefits of these scenarios:

• The mailing can be sent to both companies’ mailing lists. That means each company gets their name in front of an entirely new audience.
• A rising tide lifts all ships. The vast majority of people who are buying a home will use a real estate agent and will need a mortgage, so both companies benefit. The organizations aren’t competitors, so there are no risks in going in together.
• You get to share the costs. Any kind of marketing endeavor is expensive, and that includes direct mail. By sharing the costs of creative, lists, printing and postage, you’ll be able to send more mail to more people. And that’s always a good thing.

Now, there are some drawbacks. When you’re partnering with another organization, there will have to be compromises. You’ll have to cede both creative control and space to your partner organization. You won’t be able to do precisely what you want. For some companies, that might not be worth it. But for those who are looking to help customers create a cohesive buying cycle and send more mail to a larger mailing list, it might be worth those sacrifices.

Depending on your relationship with your partner organization, you may want to create a dedicated web landing page just for the joint campaign. That way you can precisely track the results of the campaign and make sure leads are evenly distributed. Be careful not to include too many asks in your piece—you want there to be a clear pathway to becoming a customer, at which point you can funnel the customers between each other. Be clear on how the cycle would work.

Curious about more information on direct mail marketing partnerships? Contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. We’ll help you identify strategy partners and create mailing pieces that will help you both sell more together.

The post Better Together: Strategic Partnerships and Direct Mail appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

That’s what relationship marketing is, in its simplest form. Relationship marketing could just as easily be called “educational marketing” or “non-salesy marketing.” It’s establishing yourself as an expert in the hope that prospects will recognize how awesome you are. It works in blogging, and it works in direct mail too. But it can be a hard sell for some people to explain why they should be spending time and money on marketing that doesn’t directly promote you. But here are some fool-proof arguments in favor of relationship marketing:

1. Sometimes, customers don’t know what they need. If you go to the doctor, you usually aren’t telling the doctor what kind of medication you need. You describe your symptoms, but don’t know how to fix the issue. That’s what buying is like for many people. They know that something isn’t going as well as it could be, but they don’t know how to fix it. Explaining in a way that doesn’t make you sound self-serving can help them reach the conclusion on their own, making them more responsive to the eventual sales pitch.
2. Sometimes, customers don’t know there’s a problem at all. In some cases, it’s immediately apparent there’s a problem that needs to be solved. If your car isn’t running, you know you need to get it fixed. But what if that car is running fine? Then it can be an issue of convincing that prospect that they need a newer, better car. Maybe it’s safer than what they were driving or more fuel efficient. Whatever the reason, you can explain about advancements in car technology which, by the way, your model just happens to offer.
3. Sometimes, customers need to trust you. Do you believe everything you hear? Of course not. You’re constantly going through a complex process of evaluating every statement, judging the way it’s delivered, how the information matches up with what you already know and believe and how much you just plain trust the person offering the information. The more overt sales material than advice you’re being offered, the more suspicious you’re likely to be. By simply giving the information and taking a step back, the customer is more likely to come forward and ask for more information, which lets you get them involved in your sales cycle.

There’s a time and a place for the hard sell, but don’t ignore the power of simply offering great advice and information. That’s what relationships are all about.

The post 5 Reasons You Should Care About Relationship Marketing appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

Even if you start off with the best mailing list in the world, it will slowly get dirtier and dirtier over time. People move to new addresses, move out of your target demographic or die. If you aren’t keeping your list properly maintained, you’re throwing money away as you waste resources printing and mailing pieces that are going to nowhere. Here are three simple ways to save your mailing list from such a fate:

1. De-dupe before every mailing. Duplicate addresses and names can easily sneak into your database if you’re not careful. This could be as simple as a name mentioned twice or something more complicated, like two identical pieces going to people living in the same household. Make sure that you don’t just de-duplicate your list by name, but also by address.
2. Update with customer’s information before every mailing. When sending to existing customers, many will take the time to update their information with you directly, especially if there’s some sort of billing involved. In other cases, you might need to look at official Change of Address notices from the Postal Service to understand who’s moved or passed away.
3. Update based on responses. If a prospect turned into a customer, there’s no need to keep sending them the same introductory material time and time again. Get them off of that list, which probably has a greater mailing frequency than your customer list, and make sure they’re getting information that’s relevant to them. The same goes for anyone who has opted out of your mailings—no use wasting your time with them.

If you’re leasing a list, you won’t have to deal as much with these issues, as the leasing company should be performing routine hygiene on your list. If you’ve purchased a list or are curating in-house, however, you might be on your own. If it seems overwhelming, there are data hygiene companies who can help just keep your lists up-to-date, which can reap significant savings. Or many full-service direct mail agencies, like Premier Advantage Marketing, can help you get the most out of your direct mail dollars with a clean, successful list.

The post 3 Easy Tips for Mailing List Hygiene appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

Name:
Email:
	Powered By:

The post Testing Basics and Best Practices appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

It’s not that your direct mail has typos or errors. It’s just that you stop seeing new possibilities after a while. What you’re doing works pretty well, so you keep on doing it. And doing it. And it’s fine! Nothing’s a major problem. But you’re leaving money on the table by not continuing to improve your pieces.

Whether you’re doing your direct mail in-house or you have a long-standing relationship with an agency, it might be time to shake things up. That doesn’t mean you need to fire your agency or outsource completely, it simply means having that fresh set of eyes who can look at the aspects of your marketing that have gone stale. A new perspective can help you find new angles for selling. They can assist you in finding new customer bases, acquiring new lists or revitalizing lists that might have gone stale.

A good outside consultant will be able to help you elevate the pieces you’ve already got. A complete overhaul may not be necessary, just a nip here, a tuck there and a few fresh ideas. Don’t let a direct mail campaign fade into obscurity because you aren’t doing enough to keep it fresh.

When talking to someone about auditing your direct mail, ask to see pieces they’ve designed in the past. Ask about response rates and see if they’ll give you quick, high-level impressions on one of your past pieces. You shouldn’t expect anything formalized or written, but get an idea of the kinds of advice they’d offer if you became a paying client. They shouldn’t be giving away the farm, but you also should know what you’d be paying for.

If you’re interested in that fresh set of eyes, let us know. We’d be happy to take a look at your current marketing and help take it to that next level. Just drop us a line. In the meantime, we’re off to edit our own blog posts for more of those sneaky typos!

The post A New Set of Eyes on Direct Mail appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

You don’t necessarily need to get rid of your gifts all together, but you might find that you can save tons of money and have a more profitable direct mail campaign by swapping those trinkets out for real knowledge and expertise. Instead of sending a stress ball with your logo, send a short book that will actually reduce their stress because it offers great information that makes their lives easier. Or include a link to a short video as you strut your stuff. Or offer to email them a white paper if they contact you.

Not only are these ideas less expensive than branded swag, it’s also achieving your real objective of demonstrating in real, concrete terms how you can help your prospects with their problems. This is especially useful if you’re working in a B2B industry or one where you rely heavily on showing just how great you are at what you do. If you’re in B2C, those trinkets might be the way to go after all.

If you’re concerned about how you’re going to find content for those books, white papers or videos, never fear. Chances are you already have some materials lying around that could be repurposed. If you have blog posts, email marketing or even brochures that could be expanded upon, those could all be quickly transformed into the kind of materials that make customers stand up and take notice.

Keep in mind, you want to keep these materials closely tailored to the potential interests of your prospects. Don’t send information on how to write email campaigns if the prospect is really interested in direct mail campaigns. Instead, pre-qualify them. Ask them to return a mailing card or visit a website and check the kinds of information they’re interested in receiving. That way, you can save your money and their time and only give them the info that will motivate them to real action.

Of course, it’s not a bad thing to send the odd trinket every once in a while, especially if it’s for a great client. Remember, you don’t just want to buy new clients; you also want existing customers to feel valued and appreciated. Sometimes, swag is just the thing.

For more information about how you can share your expertise with customers and prospects alike, contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. We’ll help your smarts shine.

The post Are You Buying Customers? appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

1. Coordinate your campaigns. If you’re running simultaneous campaigns, make sure they both tie together. Create coherent themes that run through both pieces. The more times customers are exposed to the same ideas, the more likely they are to stick in their minds until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. Neither the radio spot nor the direct mail piece should be identical, but they should complement each other and make sense together.
2. Get demographic. Both forms of marketing have strong methods for targeting specific groups of people. Want to hit teens? Opt for a Top 40 station. Looking for Boomers? Try an oldies station or talk radio. Sure, it’s not exactly as precise as direct mail marketing, which allows you know exactly who you’re sending to, but you can make some broad generalizations that pay off.
3. Tell them to look in their mailboxes. If you’re doing a broad mailing to all people in a certain zip code, go ahead and tell them to look in their mailbox for more information and great offers. That’ll plant the seed in their head so that when that item does pop up in their mailbox, they’ll be expecting it and give it a bit more attention.
4. Drive to different places. While you want your campaigns to be interconnected, you also want to be able to track their separate ROI. Choose different URLs or phone numbers so you can measure separately where the traffic came from. While a rising tide lifts all boats, you need to understand what percentage of leads are coming from each source.
5.   Think long-term. The benefit of both direct mail marketing and direct response radio is that it slowly builds and gains momentum over time. Don’t take a one-and-done approach to marketing. Instead, continue to grow both campaigns together, tweaking, testing and seeing what works. Over time, you’ll build equity in your brand—and money in the bank.

Interested in combining your direct response marketing? Contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. We’ll help you get both campaigns up and running in perfect harmony.

The post 5 Tips for Using Direct Mail and Radio appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

Some products are once or twice in a lifetime purchases, things like mortgages or insurance. You might not get a lot of repeat business, but every customer is paying a high monthly cost over a long period of time. While it might take several years for your investment in acquiring that customer to pay off, it can be worth it.

In other industries, people will buy more frequently but may offer lower margins. Those customers are valuable, but their real value is in how long you can keep them as customers, not in how much you make off ever purchase. In either case, you need to know the average lifetime value of a customer to help you understand how much you can spend on a direct mail—or any other kind of marketing—campaign.

To determine the lifetime value of a customer, you need to dig back into your customer records. You do have good customer records, don’t you? First, you need to determine when someone became a customer. How much they’ve spent with you over time. Do they remain customers for a day, a month, 10 years? What’s the average value of each transaction they make with you?

Now take a step back and look at how often you need to contact them to keep them a loyal customer. For instance, with mortgage clients, once you’ve made the sale, your level of direct mail marketing can be fairly low. But with a retail purchase or a travel booking, regular reminders are needed to keep you top of mind and keep them coming back for more. How much do you need to pay to maintain that customer?

Then, make sure that the cost of producing and mailing the pieces over the entire lifetime of the customer make this a good choice. If you’re spending too much, you can wind up with a boatload of low-margin, unprofitable customers eating away at your bottom line.

Need help calculating your lifetime value of a customer? Contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. Thanks for tuning in to our Direct Mail Basics series—we hope it was useful!

The post Direct Mail Basics: Know the Lifetime Value of a Customer appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

Testing is a critical part of the direct mail process. The small act of tweaking one variable, whether that’s the discount price, the response method or the envelope it’s mailed in, can have major repercussions.

Before you send a mailing to your entire list, you want to test a small subset of the list. This section needs to be representative of your list as a whole, not focusing just on loyal customers while your other test segment is on first-time buyers. It needs to be a good mix so you can understand what the larger population buying behavior will be like when you do find your magic bullet and send the mailing far and wide. Then you’ll want to carefully monitor the results until you know which road is the right one to take.

That’s a great first step, but your work doesn’t end there. One test won’t last forever. Just because a 10% off coupon was your winner last year doesn’t mean that a buy one, get one offer won’t do better this year. Just because customers responded well to a website URL for responses on your last mailing doesn’t mean that text messages won’t do better with your new mailing.

Just as your business is always changing, so are your customers. Before you send any mailing, you need to test. Even if the last mailing was spectacularly successful, there are still ways that it can be better, the responses bigger and the profits higher. Don’t get complacent with good enough.

Develop a matrix factors you should be testing. These might include:

• Offer
• Response method
• Envelop size/color/shape
• Timing of mailings
• Postcard vs. letter
• Expiration date

Some of these might seem like small changes, but even a small increase in response can make it worth your while. Maybe what you have is already right—it still doesn’t hurt to keep optimizing your page. Just as a racecar driver changes his or her setup before ever race, you need to keep your edge and keep testing.

If you’re looking for help knowing which variables to test when and what it all means, contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. We’ll help you take your mailings from meh to marvelous with focused testing and real results.

The post Direct Mail Basics: Test, Test, Test Again appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.

• Service. A lot of companies want to claim they have the best service, so you need to have a why behind this. Do you bring products to people’s homes? Do you offer a great return policy, a private banker, a 24-hour service line? Be as specific as you can about why your service is better than that guy up the street charging half the price.
• Quality. Again, you’ve got to be specific. In advertising, it’s perfectly legal to say things like “the best travel agency in the world!” It’s called puffery, and you don’t have to back it up with hard facts. But everyone ignores it. Talk about what makes it so high quality: The materials you use to create it, the interest rates, the beautiful amenities, whatever. As much as you can, remember to show, not tell. Use pictures or even links to videos whenever possible.
• Value. Value and price are kissing cousins, but not quite the same. Value is the intersection of price and quality. It means that neither are the primary motivating factor, but that what you get for the money is good. Again, quantify this as much as you can: “Premier private banking service with deposits as low as $100,000.” Get specific.

When it comes time to craft your direct mail offer, you can’t betray your value proposition. If you sell on service and quality, don’t offer steep discounts. Not only will you lose your shirt, people might wonder what’s wrong with the product or service. Or you could condition them to only buy from you when there’s a coupon, which is equally bad practice. Instead, offer them a chance to see the quality for themselves through a video or meet the people who will be serving them by coming to your location. Let them get comfortable with how you do business instead of bribing them.

Still not sure how to craft that offer that meets your value proposition? Contact Premier Advantage Marketing, a direct marketing agency. We’ll help you create a campaign that’s true to yourself and helps you find new customers.

The post Direct Mail Basics: Promotions that Fit You appeared first on Direct Mail Marketing 101.