As with every aspect of your business, the more thought you put into planning, the better the chance of success. Planning a direct marketing campaign can be a simple process and you effectively need to ask yourself several basic questions:

1. What is my objective? Sell more? Increase brand awareness? Increase customer loyalty?
2. How will I measure the campaign performance?
3. Do I need to follow up my mailing and if so, how?
4. What is my message?
5. Who are my target audience?

Answering these questions and thinking about the required processes already form the basics of your plan.

Set your objectives

Establishing a clear list of objectives at the beginning of your campaign makes creating and running the campaign much easier. As the old adage says, you should set SMART objectives – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. This will help to improve your chances of a successful and profitable campaign.

Define your audience

The better you can define your ideal customer, the better your response rates, conversions and overall profits. By working to get your message in front of the people who are most likely to need your product or service you will reduce your mailing costs and form the basis for long term profitable marketing campaigns.

Who your audience should be is normally determined by a profiling analysis of your existing customer base, what they purchased and their life-time value to you. List-Logic can help you through this process.

Marketing Lists

Once you know who you want to mail you need to find a name and address list that best matches the audience you want to contact. There are many databases available – all with merits and drawbacks. List-Logic have worked with these databases for over 20 years and can provide sound advice on which will work best for you. Not only that but as a partner to many of these businesses we can often offer them to you at a lower cost than if you went direct!

Testing

In the early stages of any direct mail campaign, you should test different messages and creative approaches by splitting the campaign into equal parts with similar audience profiles.  This can provide invaluable insights into which types of mail-piece, message or offer work best for your product or service.

Plan

It’s very important not to forget the details. Consider every aspect of the campaign – including how you handle and fulfill any responses. There is no point generating 2% response to a mailing if you don’t have the resources to respond efficiently to that level of interest or you don’t have the product volumes available to meet the demand. Again, List-Logic can help you through every aspect of this process and ensure your mailing campaign is not only profitable – but efficient!