OSM Increasing the Longevity of Your Small Business with Direct Mail Services

Maximizing Your Small Business With Direct Mail Services

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If you are a small business owner, you know that it is do-or-die to reach your customers with resonating dialogue. The main reason why small businesses fail to accomplish this is due to a poor marketing strategy. Even though we live in a highly digital age, direct mail allows businesses to bypass spam folders and get a piece of copy in the consumer’s hands.

The Effectiveness of Direct Mail

According to a Compu-Mail article called “25 Direct Marketing Statistics Prove Direct Mail Works,” 56% of customers find print marketing to be the most trustworthy type of marketing. This is due to the fact that direct mail offers small businesses the ability to get more personal with their message. This makes the customer feel less like a name on a list and more like a valued individual whose needs want to be met by your brand. Moreover, many recognize that it takes more effort to personalize a physical piece of copy rather than an email. With 70% of Americans saying mail is more personal than the internet, it may be time to consider using direct mail to reach your customers in a more meaningful way.

What Kinds of Copy Should You Send?

There are many things you can send to customers to ensure that your business stays top of mind. You can send postcards, coupons, brochures, catalogs, and other sorts of promotional materials. When trying to draft a design of your copy, you should be mindful of three things: eye-catching visuals, a strong message, and a clear action. All of these aspects need to then be tied together in a way that is personal for the customer. Without that key aspect, your copy will not have the glue to stay together when it gets into someone hands, and will most likely fall on deaf ears.

Who Should You Target?

The old method of mailing to as many people as you possibly can in the hope someone finds interest in your brand is just not feasible. This is especially wasteful for marketing budgets. The best way is to build customer profiles by figuring out who would be your ideal customer. From there you need to learn as much as you can about this customer like their age, demographic, and shopping habits. Of course, this will require more work if you are trying to target a whole new group of people that have not heard of your brand. You should also be targeting your current customers, for it is much easier to maintain current customers that have than it is to get new ones.

Start Your First Direct Mail Campaign

Direct mail is still an effective method for reaching your customer base. With highly personalized messaging complimented by stunning visuals, you can improve customer engagement and response with your marketing campaign. Take advantage of the direct mail’s versatility by sending different kinds of copy. Start physically connecting with your ideal customer with One Stop Mail, and begin breaking down the digital barrier that separates your brand from reaching eager ears.

LI Post Direct Mail for Non Profits 2

Direct Mail for Non Profits – Two Easy Ways to Save Money

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Although smaller nonprofit organizations have to initiate campaigns with smaller budgets, there are strategies that can be used to ensure savings on direct mail for non profits. We will discuss two strategies to help make a smaller budget achieve more. These strategies help save money and get you more bang for your buck, including unbranding and print planning.

Stripping Away the Branding Fluff

Sprinkling company plugs throughout your marketing materials has become second nature. However, this can be detrimental to the campaign’s success because people are hyper-aware when they encounter a marketing message. In “Pull the Plug The Value of Unbranded Content,” they say that if the target consumer does read on, they do so with a filter. They know that whatever they read next is subjective and is meant to be persuasive. This can affect your results, and lead to a campaign with undesirable data, diminishing your ROI.

To keep this from happening with your target audience, you can strip away all marketing identification. According to Joe Boland’s article “20 Big Ideas for Small Nonprofits,” the Southern Environmental Law Center tried sending their materials in a blank envelope with just the recipient’s information. This proved to be an effective strategy and allowed them to keep their costs down.  

Print Everything All At Once  

Many companies overlook the benefits of printing as many things as they can at the same time.  If you are printing multiple versions of a four-color brochure, you can save costs by using the same press sheet. Just make sure to be as detailed as possible when you send out your project for a quote. This will allow your printer to plan accordingly, which will help cut down on the number of plate changes and make-readies.

Now, to put your potential savings into perspective, let’s take a look at some numbers. In Joe Boland’s article, he  cited a real life example that details how much money a client ended up saving. The client had two acquisition mailings of 25,000 pieces. If they had printed them separately, they would have cost $7,198 each in comparison to $6,146 if they were printed together. That was an 8.7 percent decrease in cost per donor, from $81 to $74.

Repeat Direct Mail for Non Profits’ Success Stories

Keep in mind that these two ideas are meant to reduce your direct mail costs. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the results. Always make sure to check your data against the costs of a campaign so you can better optimize your next initiative to reach your desired goals within your budget. If you are unsure how to approach your next direct mail campaign, consider working with One Stop Mail so you can write a new success story and overcome your financial limitations.