6 Strategies to Help You Save Money with Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is a tried-and-true advertising method that can help you build brand awareness and customer loyalty over time. But there are cost-effective measures that you should employ to reap the rewards of your efforts. Use the following direct mail marketing strategies to save costs, expand your outreach, and maximize your gains.

Grow Your Direct Mail Marketing List

Although renting mailings lists is the most common method of acquiring prospective customer data, it comes with a lot of limitations. For one thing, you don’t own the list and that means you have to pay a fee to gain continuous access to it whenever you want. This is a good starting point, but it can get very expensive over time.

Once you start building brand awareness, consider purchasing your mailing list so that you can keep adding to it and have unlimited access. Cutting out the rental fees saves you a lot of money and also allows you to continue cultivating your existing customer journeys rather than having to start from scratch with new prospects.

Use Templates and Professional Designers

Creating brand new template designs for every single ad campaign is time-consuming and expensive. Using a basic template as your jumping-off point for each new ad campaign is a smart way to cut down on direct mail marketing costs and accelerate the process. The faster you can get your direct mail marketing materials to print, the sooner they’ll be delivered to your existing and prospective customers.

All you have to do is make a few textual and design tweaks and change out the images to create an entirely new ad campaign using the same basic template.

Update and Verify Your Mailing List

Mail correspondences and marketing materials that are addressed to a specific recipient can be returned to the sender for a number of reasons. Whether you have the incorrect address on file or the intended recipient has moved or passed away, it’s important to regularly update your mailing list to avoid preventable mistakes.

Rather than wasting time trying to figure out why you’re not getting any responses from these prospects, it’s best to simply wash your hands clean of them as it were, and move on to more promising leads. Removing undeliverables from your mailing list frees up your time and money to focus on further refining your direct mail marketing strategies.

Address verification software is an affordable and convenient solution that automates the process of verifying the contact information that’s included in your prospect database so you don’t have to do it manually.

Reduce the Size, Reduce the Cost

When it comes to press sheets, size matters. If you want to reduce the cost of printing and shipping direct mail marketing materials, then consider minimizing the size of the press sheets, catalogs, and newsletters. The larger your marketing materials are, the more they weigh and take up space in shipping and transportation vehicles.

Reformatting your marketing material design by making the font smaller or moving a few items around can help you fit more content on a single page without impacting the image quality or readability.

Give Recipients the Option to Unsubscribe

The last thing you want is for prospects to be unwillingly subscribed to your direct mailing list. While it’s unfortunate that some people might want to unsubscribe from your mailing list for one reason or another, it’s not the end of the world.

You can certainly try using customer retention tactics to convince them to stay on board. But if that doesn’t work, don’t try to force their hand. Give customers the option of unsubscribing from your mailing list and use this as a learning experience by asking for constructive feedback instead of fighting them on it.

Track Results to Optimize Future Campaigns

Tracking your results is the only way to understand the full scope and impact of your direct mail marketing campaigns. There are a number of methods you can use to track your results and optimize future campaigns, including:

• Using unique URLs and phone numbers for each ad campaign
• Using unique coupon codes
• Using unique QR codes
• Paying attention to your response rate (the percentage of prospects who respond to your ads)
• Looking at your conversion or order rate (the percentage of people who placed an order through your direct mail marketing campaign)
• Analyzing your cost per acquisition, average order sizes, revenue per order, and return on investment

Direct Mail Marketing Services from North American Media

North American Media is one of the fastest-growing direct mail marketing media and brand building companies in the United States. We specialize in direct mail marketing, space advertising, radio, alternative media, digital advertising, and television. Contact us to learn more.