In a marketing industry where bigger always seems better, smaller mailers are often a superior choice to attract the notice of potential customers. Creating mailers that are cute and convenient provides a distinctive look and branding to a company’s direct mail efforts. Read More

In direct mail, there are many key components to a successful campaign. Direct mail campaigns can easily flop, so learning proven techniques for ensuring success is crucial. The first step towards victory is reviewing the misguided traditions of failed direct mail campaigns. Read More

  Thought leadership and content marketing are primarily an online, internet-based marketing strategy, but there’s no reason the precepts of these two ideas can’t be used in direct mailers. Rather than pummeling potential customers with blatant ads and cheap tricks, direct mail marketing businesses should consider including useful, unique, and relevant content on their mailers. Read More

Direct mailers are no longer resigned to simple postcards and letter-sized envelops. These days, there are much more inventive options for direct mail campaigns, from mailers that double as pencil holders, to puzzle mailers requiring customer participation to piece together the necessary information. Read More

Don’t tell my wife, but I’m thinking about getting a tattoo. You can see it pictured here. It’s not as “out there” as a Harley Davidson tattoo, but it communicates something important: “I Love Direct Mail.” Why? As a marketing professional, I find there’s something very honest and straightforward about direct mail marketing.  It’s not vague and hard to pin down like branding. I’m not saying that branding isn’t important (it is). It’s just that sometimes, it’s hard to say—at least in the short run—whether your branding is effective or not. Read More

  If you’ve been using direct mail as a marketing medium for a few years, you may remember the old debate about whether long copy of short copy was better for generating response. Some argued that recipients wouldn’t take the time to read long letters or catalogs. Others said longer copy developed a deeper relationship with the reader and broke down objections. Today the debate seems to be whether your audience will read it at all! Read More

What do you do when you run across an email that you think is interesting—but don’t have time to review right now? If you’re like me, you leave it in your inbox so you can read it later. But three days later there are 200 additional messages in your inbox and you don’t have time to sort through them to find the one you were planning to read. How about if you come across an interesting article online that you know you want to check out? Maybe you bookmark it. But unless you have some kind of reminder to go back and check it, you’ll likely to forget about it. Read More

  Years ago The Wall Street Journal sent out a direct mail package that (based on performance) has to rank as one of the most effective mailings ever. That assumes, of course that you consider generating some $2 billion in revenue as a good direct mail performance! The mailing included a letter, excerpted here: Read More

  Direct Mail has been around for a long time. As a matter of fact, the earliest known form of direct marketing occurred in Egypt in 1000 BC, when a landowner wrote an advertisement on a piece of papyrus offering gold for the return of his slave. (We can quibble over whether that was actually direct mail, since mail didn’t exist in it’s current form then—but that’s really just water under the Nile bridge.) The point is that direct mail has long been regarded as an effective way to reach potential audiences. In our days of “It’s-new-therefore-it-must-be better” marketing, some have kicked direct mail to the curb. Some of that action has taken place because of some misconceptions about modern marketing. Let’s look at four of those misconceptions. Read More

  The United States Post Office (USPS) has been trying to make it easier for small businesses to reach potential customers in specific geographic areas. That’s a big reason behind their Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) program. The program lets businesses that do a majority of their business in a (relatively) small geographic area (restaurants, coffee shops, etc.) focus exclusively on that area. It actually makes a lot of sense for certain businesses—and the USPS has promoted the program fairly aggressively. As usual, however, there is more than one way to get things done. We thought it might be helpful to compare the EDDM program from the USPS with doing a carrier route mailing through a Mail Service Provider (MSP). Read More