UKMailShot Blog

Blog about Direct Marketing Trends. www.ukmailshot.com

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Who gets Mail? The Challenge for Direct Marketers

Targeting the right prospects is critical to a campaign's success.

Marketers must look choose a target market based not only on the campaign message, but where that target overlaps with the demographic who are most likely to read the message. How do we ensure we are reaching these people?

Why not blanket mail everyone? One method is to blindly send.This is most effective for ensuring that the message is read by those who will respond. But this method has at least two major problems:

1. Most obviously, it's expensive and wasteful. It will dramatically reduce ROI. The cost per client acquisition would almost certainly be extremely high.

2. It is likely that your one-size-fits-all message won't appeal to most people that see it. This is bad for your brand - any thing that isn't relevant to a target is just junk mail.

Research shows that 18-24 year olds are amongst the highest responding age groups for direct mail campaigns.

For these reasons it's important that we hit the right people with the right message.

How?

A better approach is to test using smaller, targeted campaigns and then measure the response. We can do this by: Targeting - Choosing exactly who we target. Who is most likely to respond to a particular message? Personalising - Personalising the message to the target. For example, do males need different imagery to females? Should we use the target's name in the headline? Measuring - This is the most valuable part and can't be given enough importance. We need to know what is working and, more importantly, what's not. There are different ways to measure response. For example, different using promo codes or different website landing page for each different campaign experiment.

The goal is to find the sweet spot between the prospects you are trying to talk to, and those that will respond.

We need to choose a target based on the message AND the medium.

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