What is targeted direct mail?

Imagine trying to sell a range of cars you stock to Ford Motors, or selling a range of mobile phone contracts to BT – the chances are you won’t get much of a response, and your mailing campaign will produce little to no response.  Targeting your direct mail is therefore vital if you want to improve the success and profitability of your campaigns.

By targeting your direct mail you will increase your response rates, and improve your Return on Investment, contacting people and organisations likely to want or listen to what you have to say.

Don’t waste money

Targeting a mail-shot can dramatically improve response rates by helping to ensure that only people likely to respond will receive your mailing.  In many cases response rates can be increased five-fold simply by careful selection of your target audience.

Who to mail?

Focus on each of your products / services individually.

Review what your current customers have purchased, ask them why they have purchased and how they benefit from the service / product you have provided.  Calculate the lifetime value of that customer, i.e. how long they stay as customers and how much profit you make over that time.  Based on this information, work out which of your customers are most profitable and most loyal?

For each product / service supplied, itemise the benefits.  Examples could be saving time, reducing costs, or improving the products & services they themselves offer.

Now do some digging to understand what’s common about the group of customers that have purchased that specific product or service.  This could be their size, the number of employees they have, their location in the UK, the type of business activity (SIC) they have elected to define themselves under.  How old the business is, is it a new start up, their turnover.  The list is endless but these are the main ones.  For consumers / residential addresses, you may be more interested in where they live, size of the family, type of housing, income, how many cars they drive, how many loans they have, how many children and so on.

The idea is that these organisations who may be long standing customers are so for a reason and most likely that reason is that cost to use you, provides them with a Return on Investment.  You understand why they purchase and what those benefits are.  You now understand a little about the profile of organisation that buys from you.  What remains is to go out and look for organisations or people that have similar profiles to your existing customers.  And when writing to them, show and promote the benefits that your existing customers have received by asking a purchase with you.  Even better if you can in your communications say “don’t take our word for it@ here is a testimonial from an organisation who looks like you – same size, same SIC code, etc.

Purchasing your list

Mailing lists can vary enormously in terms of size, content, accuracy and also how up to date they are. Each mailing list and the provider will have it’s own merits which should be understood – the key is to select a list which matches your customer profile as closely as possible.  The more accurate the match, the better the response rate.  With our own service, we can offer a digital map that allows you to understand how many address records fall within a specific area.   Once defined, you can pull off the list for a mailing campaign.