Direct Mail Marketing For Small Business

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Direct Mail Marketing For Small Business

Basically, direct mail marketing is printing and mailing marketing collaterals to prospects and customers to gain business from them. Since you are sending a form of physical correspondence, people tend to interact with it more than any digital or display ads. Direct mail reaches people directly at their doorsteps, so it is hard to ignore it. Moreover, its tangible nature appeals to the audience.

Many marketers have now realized that direct mail marketing performs better than social media and email marketing. In fact, instead of using a single marketing channel, you can combine direct mail with digital marketing to get better results. As a standalone marketing form, direct mail continues to yield good results. But, in combination with other channels, it can be unstoppable.

• 70% of customers have stated that direct mail feels more personal when compared to online correspondence
• Direct mail receives a high open rate—about 90%
• Response rates increase by 135% when you include someone’s first name in your direct mail item
• 39% of customers purchase from a company for the first time after receiving a direct mail piece from them

These statistics clearly reflect the importance of direct mail marketing. Direct mail for small businesses can perform exceptionally well when done right. It can help your small business stand out from the crowd and create an image for itself. Moreover, it is budget-friendly, which is why you can conduct a direct mail campaign without exhausting your marketing budget. Though there are a lot of things to be planned before conducting a campaign, marketers can get it all done easily through print and mail automation. Direct mailing services like PostGrid can help companies streamline all their direct mailing activities.

In this article, we shall discuss the basics of direct mail along with its benefits, uses, types, steps to create a campaign, and some direct mail tips for small businesses.

Why Is Direct Mail Marketing Still Useful to Small Businesses?

Does direct mail work for small businesses? It may seem like direct mail is dead. But, the reality is far from that. People are delighted to receive mail delivered to their physical mailboxes—making direct mailing for small businesses a must to use.

Direct Mail is Engaging and Interactive

Direct mail speaks louder than email or a sponsored ad on social media. It offers something to recipients that makes them save the item for use. Moreover, with the right CTA, you can convince them to do something that can push them forward in their customer journey.

We have already said that people like receiving things in the mail. Hence, when your direct mail arrives, they are likely to be excited to know its contents. By using eye-catching designs and amazing offers, you can get people to respond easily.

Direct Mail is Memorable

Direct mail for small businesses creates nostalgia. It reminds people of the time when mail was a common part of communication and used by every single person. Hence, it adds to the emotional appeal of your mail item. By connecting with someone emotionally, you can increase engagements significantly. To add more personal touches, use the person’s first name and handwritten messages.

Direct Mail Offers Wider Reach

If you select the right demographics and locations, you can target a lot more people than you can through email or social media. There are many people who still aren’t active on digital communication platforms, and it is easy to miss out on them. However, direct mail allows you to reach such people and communicate with them personally. Hence, widened reach is also one of the benefits of direct mail for small businesses.

Direct Mail Faces Limited Competition

Most people are surprised when they receive direct mail because they are used to endless web banners and pop-up ads everywhere, which is annoying a lot of times. Direct mail offers a break from the digital clutter. Seeing the number of digital advertisements, it is safe to say that the direct mail industry is limited to a few players. You can leverage this fact to your advantage. Less competition and more flexibility can help small businesses do great with direct mail marketing.

Direct Mail Has a Longer Shelf-Life

Depending on your marketing collateral and offer, a direct mailpiece stays longer in the house or office than any other marketing form. No email is read for more than a few minutes, but direct mail is seen and kept for several days until it’s time for the recipient to use the offer. Direct mail marketing for small businesses is cost-effective because they don’t have to send out mail items every second day. It has a longer shelf life, and it is completely fine even if you conduct a few campaigns spread across the year.

How Much Does a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign Cost?

The cost of direct mail for small and medium businesses differs considerably. On the one hand, you can keep your costs under control by using house lists, doing your own designing, and choosing affordable collaterals like postcards. On the contrary, some marketers go for oversized collaterals, rented mailing lists, and outsourced designing. Hence, the costs depend on the type of direct mail, campaign size, type of mailing lists, designing, copywriting, and many more factors.

Talking about the type of direct mail, the USPS allows marketers to send standard-size postcards at the rate of $0.35 per piece. Letters and flats can be mailed at $0.50 and $1.22 per piece, respectively.

For designing, again, you have several options to get started. The first one is DIY designing, wherein you get it done in-house. In this case, you don’t have to pay anything exclusively for your campaign. The next option is to purchase online templates. The average cost of a template is around $10, and there are several websites that sell them. However, if you are looking for something more concrete, you might want to consider hiring a professional who can design exquisite artworks for your collateral. But, most professionals charge around $24.21 per hour—which can sometimes be expensive for small businesses. Your copywriting costs can be anywhere from $0 to $100, depending on whether you get a copy written in-house or hire a professional copywriter on a per-hour basis. Make sure that your copy is attention-grabbing and action-driving, as the success of your campaign depends on it majorly.

Direct mail marketing for a small business can be done at extremely affordable rates when you use house lists. House lists are the ones that you already have—the names and mailing addresses of your existing customers and leads. You don’t have to pay even a dollar to anyone if you want to work with your own lists. Purchased mailing lists can cost $0.02 to $0.30 per record. If you don’t have your own mailing lists and also don’t want to purchase them, you can use the USPS EDDM option. EDDM helps marketers reach every house and/or office in specific neighborhoods based on their ZIP codes. It is an affordable way to conduct targeted marketing.

Next up on your list are printing costs. The rates start at $0.03 per piece, but you can end up paying as much as $2 per piece for printing. These costs vary depending on the color, paper size, weight, quantity, number of pages per item, paper quality, finishing, and number of sides.

You can either choose to send your mail items through USPS Marketing Mail (suitable for large-scale campaigns) or First-Class Mail (an affordable option to conduct smaller campaigns). Apparently, you can save a lot by using the First-Class Mail option.

Types of Direct Mail

Marketers can choose from among the types of direct mail that best suits their marketing message. Some of the popular choices are:

Postcards

Grow your small business with marketing postcards. Using postcards under direct mail marketing for small businesses is always the safest option. They are small, hence cost-effective. Plus, they don’t require envelopes, which makes their open rates high. Postcards are the most eye-catching and impressive direct mail type—making it the first choice for all direct mail marketers. They are usually used for event promotions, announcements, and product launches.

If your message exceeds the size of your postcard, you can tweak the postcard size. Popular postcard sizes include 3.5” x 5”, 4” x 6”, 5” x 7”, 6” x 8”, 6” x 9”, and 6.125” x 11.5”. Oversized postcards can produce amazing results as they stand out from the rest of the mail items in mailboxes. People tend to view oversized mail quickly and keep it for a longer time.

Letters

If you are looking for better personalization and more space, you can go for letters. You can simply add pages and include everything that you want. Sometimes, companies send out response forms along with their direct mail letters to motivate recipients to reply. These forms are postage-paid. Letters are mostly used for products and services that require an in-depth explanation.

To increase your open and response rates, include some fascinations on the envelope that has the ability to lure people inside. Customized envelopes can also do the job.

Flats

Oversized envelopes are considered and charged as flats by the USPS—which increases your postal charges. Therefore, try to stay within the USPS size and weight dimensions to get the lowest rates.

However, you can choose to send flats if your message needs a large space and an oversized mail is relevant for it.

By experimenting with different designs, colors, and formats, you can add different attributes to the same mail pieces and see which one works better.

How Do Direct Mail Marketing Campaigns Work?

Even small businesses can conduct direct mail campaigns and be successful at them. Direct mail for small businesses works in the same way as medium and large businesses. However, the trick is to have your process clear and objectives defined. Find below the steps to conduct a successful direct mail campaign.

1. Identify Your Goals

It is crucial to list your goals before you even think about conducting a campaign. Your goals should fuel the campaign. There are several common goals that most companies conduct campaigns for:

• Generating fresh leads
• Re-engaging old customers
• Getting prospects to attend a trade fair
• Introducing new products or services
• Announcing season sales and discounts
• Driving online traffic

Defining your goals beforehand makes it easier for marketers to decide on the further steps.

2. Know Your Target Audience

There are several direct mail benefits for small businesses, but you can’t avail of those unless you know your target audience well. Who are your customers? What do they do? Where do they reside? By understanding these things about your current customers, you can find their “look-alikes” easily and target them. Note down your buyer characteristics and understand your target audience deeply.

3. Build a Mailing List

As we discussed above, mailing lists can be in-house or purchased from a third party. Sometimes, marketers even rent mailing lists for a particular period of time. Make sure to clarify the terms of use before renting mailing lists—the number of times you can mail to the addresses in it, the time duration up to which you can use it, and so on.

If you already have a house list with complete, verified addresses, you don’t need to create one. Otherwise, you can also use PostGrid’s automated direct mail solutions to build targeted mailing lists from scratch. Focus on the demographics that fit with your customer profile.

4. Decide On Your Offers

What are you going to offer to your recipients? Is it a 20% discount on their first purchase or a buy 1 get 1 deal? Always offer something in your direct mail items. Direct mail without an offer is of absolutely no use as it will fail to spark your audience’s interest. Plus, without an offer, there will be no motivation for them to complete your call to action.

5. Structure a Response Mechanism

Your CTA can also be called your response mechanism. How do you want your customers to respond to your offer? PURLs, QR codes, redeemable discount codes, and dedicated contact numbers are some popular ways to track responses. Mention them as your CTA against the offer you make. Oftentimes, some marketers also mention their address as a response mechanism for people to visit their store and avail of the offer.

6. Choose a Format and Design Your Mail

Decide whether you want to use marketing postcards or letters. After selecting the format, you can move ahead with your designing process. Take care to design something that is eye-catching, relevant to your message, and also suits your brand standards. Choose vibrant colors that make the message stand out. All the aspects of your design should be differentiated from one another and get equal attention. There are several creative direct mail ideas for small businesses that you can refer to for designing tips.

Print and Send Your Mail Items Through the USPS

This part can be complicated as printing and mailing so many items is not easy. It requires a lot of effort, time, and human resources. However, you can simplify the process through automation. PostGrid can help you get your items printed and mailed to all your recipients in an automated way.

Direct Mailing Services

To give you an idea of how direct mailing services can help you in your print and mail marketing efforts, let us go through some examples.

Vistaprint

Vistaprint can help you launch your campaigns easily using one single platform. You can design your own postcards and then upload your mailing list. You can also choose your target audience based on certain criteria.

Cactus Mail

With Cactus Mail, you can conduct affordable and flexible direct mail marketing campaigns. Their marketing plans are obligation-free, which means you don’t have to pay minimum charges or commit to anything. Marketers can simply conduct a campaign of any size and at any time. Plus, you can track your campaign performance.

Every Door Direct Mail

Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is a USPS program that allows you to target certain ZIP codes or neighborhoods. It is the most affordable option to mail with the USPS. However, the USPS takes care of only the mailing part. For designing and printing, you can contact one of their partner vendors.

With USPS direct mail for small businesses, you don’t have to worry about having a mailing list. EDDM works great for all local businesses like restaurants, real estate agencies, retail stores, health clinics, and others.

Mail Shark

Mail Shark helps marketers conduct targeted marketing instead of saturated marketing. You can pinpoint certain demographics that you want to cover based on your buyer profile. Customized designing, flexible payments, printing services, and delivery confirmation are some of the more advantages of using Mail Shark.

Next-Day Flyers

If you want to print and mail something urgently, you need direct mail marketing companies that can get it all done in just one day. Next-Day Flyers can help get your direct mail items created, printed, and mailed overnight.

Print Label and Mail

If you have a time crunch and choose to outsource your entire campaign process, Print Label and Mail can help you. It offers all-in-one services. Plus, if you already have your postcards printed, it can help you label and mail them.

Similarly, local mailing services like Printingforless.com, Modern Postcard, Psprint, US Mailing House, and Click2Mail can help sort your mailing activities.

While selecting a solution provider, you need to take care of a lot of things—their designing system, printing services, ability to track performance, added data security, mailing lists, address verification, mailing options, and more.

PostGrid’s print and mail API can do everything from designing and printing to mailing and tracking and everything in between. Fortunately, marketers can avail all these services altogether at all-inclusive rates—making it quick, easy, and affordable to conduct a direct mail campaign. PostGrid makes direct mail advertising for small businesses cost-effective, easy to conduct, and simple to track. Furthermore, it is compliant with HIPAA, PIPEDA, SOC-2, and several other data privacy and security protection laws. You can print and mail checks and other important documents securely through PostGrid.

Find below some of the things that PostGrid can assist you with:

• Designing marketing postcards, letters, checks, invoices, and more. It can also help you indulge in transpromo advertising. You don’t need to search for a good designer anymore; simply use PostGrid’s in-built design templates.
• Printing in the best possible quality.
• Building mailing lists using different demographics, geographics, and psychographics.
• Standardizing, validating, and verifying addresses so that you mail only to the most updated and precise addresses. With reduced lost mail and failed deliveries, small businesses can save a lot.
• Mailing effectively and accurately.
• Mailing without having to worry about minimum volume requirements and monthly fees.
• Tracking campaign results and getting access to analytics and reports related to them.

Best Practices for Direct Mail Marketing

Follow the direct mail tips for small businesses mentioned below to optimize your campaigns:

• Use easy to read and clear fonts like Arial
• Send follow-up direct mail to targeted clients
• Do not overwhelm your readers with too many images and words
• Tailor your messages according to your audience
• Proof your designs well before printing
• Make your offer the focal point of your direct mail item
• Run several tests before launching a large-scale campaign
• Include links to your website and social media pages to drive online traffic.

Wrapping Up

Direct mail for small businesses has been working for several decades. However, it had been shadowed a few years ago when digital marketing started getting into the limelight. But, it is back in business as marketers have started understanding its importance and have made it an integral part of their marketing strategies.

By following all the right steps, running tests, recording results, and learning from your campaign insights, you can conduct excellent marketing campaigns that are memorable and result in an increased ROI. Small businesses can keep their costs low and still perform amazingly using PostGrid’s print and mail automation solutions. PostGrid can be your one-stop solution for every direct mailing need there is.

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