Direct Mailing

For the OP

Direct mail is just a delivery vehicle. It's more important what your marketing message is... and who, and how carefully, you have targeted the list of recipients.

As a delivery method, direct mail offers specific characteristics that can be beneficial, if you know how they match your intended audience. Expectations matching interest. Your offer is always key. If the message doesn't ring their chimes, it doesn't matter how you deliver it.

The latest statisitics show the direct marketing industry is down a bit in 2010... a ball park figure around $3.2 billion. That's consumer and b2b and a total industry figure. But that's no small potatoes for a marketing medium.

Of course, we're talking B2B here in this forum... and in the USA, businesses from large to small still use direct mail for new customer acquisition, customer retention and engagement, etcetera, etcetera.

The question here is how B2B direct mail might help an offline marketer, so the answer depends on your business model. Most offline models I'm familiar with, can certainly use direct mail successfully... both alone and in conjunction with phone call followups.

Dave Zegers above, laid out his direct mail marketing for mobile websites... I have several people following that model very successfully. It works very well if you target the right audience. And please notice that Dave is willing to put in the effort to create those emulator landing pages. Those are golden with this product pitch since it resonates both a positive and negative tone. "Wow, that's cool." And fear of loss... "Oh crap, my competition is going to have this soon, I don't want to be left out."

Dave is also maximizing the benefit of his direct mail investment... by working a back-end profit funnel. In fact, this is the way to attain a very, very large ROI on that initial investment. He's looking at it properly... to the LCV(lifetime customer value). I wouldn't be at all surprised if he finds a total ROI of 100 to 1 or higher on his initial spend. Even spending $1 and get $20 back in total revenue is a bargain in lead generation methods.

Match the right offline business model with proper direct mail strategy and you have a winner. Stick with proven winners for a product or service that will lead to back-end profits with recurring monthly income and upsells

Don't attempt to sell with direct mail. I would recommend focusing direct mail and phone toward a lead generation stategy. Using targeting methods lowers the numbers, the dollar costs, and increases conversion and ROI. Where targeting criteria are not known then direct mail can be a great tool in filtering a shaky target list down to the market-qualified leads.

Direct mail costs can be dramatically lowered by doing the proper segmenting and profiling to fit your model. That's what marketing really is. The difference is mailing 1000 businesses from a directory while hoping and praying. Or mailing a specific personalized message to 200 businesses that are already predisposed to be interested in your message. That's an 80% reduction right there. And this leads to much less time and effort on followups and certainly improves conversion ratios.

Finally, do not ignore testing. You can do small mailings to split test the offer and headlines, the critical elements. Never roll out a large campaign until you have some numbers from testing.

I recommend you look at direct mail as a sharp tool that can fit into your marketing toolbox. Done correctly it rarely fails to deliver a very good ROI. But I always keep my eye on other methods. We find great success is combining strategies. PostCard/Phone Call. Email/Phone Call. Call/Send Fax. Priority Mail/Phone call.

We had much of this covered in another thread here. you might want to check it out

http://www.warriorforum.com/offline-...il-do-you.html

Best Regards,
Jan Gregory