Best way to send out direct mail?

I was looking for information on the best way to send out direct mail postcards. We have been just mailing out 10,000 pieces every 3 months to all the homes in my area.

i was wondering if direct mail is like door hanger, where they work better the 2nd and 3rd time if you do them a week apart and mail to the same homes 3 times

My thought was to switch up what i have been doing and only mail out 3333 mailers to the same set of homes every week for 3 weeks, like they recommend for door hanging. Does anyone know if that would be a better idea compared to what i have been doing by just flooding the entire market one time every couple months. The old way i have been doing it we see about a 3% return which is not bad, i was wondering if we do the same home for 3 weeks each week if we could see that number get higher like 4-5% from the repetition

Thanks!!

It really depends on your goals. In general once will pull a slightly better response, but hitting the same area 3 times will get a higher percentage of the people in that area, which, in terms of sales and customer generation is a good thing.

To make the example easy, say you have 1000 homes in your delivery area. If you hit all 1000 at once, you might see a 2.5-3% return on your d-mails. If you divide your area up into quadrants, and hit the first quadrant 3 times with in 10 days, you will see a return pf about 4-5%. Not 3 times the rate of hitting them once, but you have activated more customers in that area. Because delivery areas aren’t unlimited, hitting the same area and generating more customers from one area will increase your sales more over the long run, in terms of repeat business.

If you have a kindle, The Art Of Money Getting by P. T. Barnum is a free download (you can download the kindle app for your PC and read it there as well if you don’t have a kindle). It is a short book, and well worth reading.

Like any marketing method, you will have to experiment to see what works best in your market…If you have lots of aggressive competition you will have to put in more effort to get the best response…

In my pizza shop days, I found that a 6 week cycle worked best…So we divided our delivery area into 6 zones and just did 1 each week for 6 weeks and then repeated…Over and over and over for a very long time…

As far as offers, if you can clearly separate zones I would test a menu with no offers and see how it pulls versus having offers…We found that marketing more frequently with no offers gave us a better bottom line…

And you can also consider more targeted mailings to lazy names in your database…These typically would have a more aggressive offer than your general mailing…

Has anyone looked into the USPS every home direct mailing that has been advertised of late? I sent away for their ‘kit’ to see how useful it could be.

Hi Jokergerm,

In addition to the great feedback above, here are some additional thoughts.

On the surface it sounds like you have identified your target market and you have a nice balance of Frequency (the number of times you are exposing your prospects to your ad) & Reach (the number of people exposed to the ad) which is very important. There is no doubt that one of the major wastes of marketing dollars is advertising without the proper frequency.

Without a complete understanding of your entire marketing strategy that you are currently engaged in and your budget I am at somewhat of a disadvantage to give you more specific advice. However, I am not initially sure that your current strategy is broken. As a matter of fact it may be working just fine. It may in fact be the actual advertisement that is failing?

You reference that you are sending out postcards 4 times per year?

1. Do you only mail postcards? If so I would recommend testing other products like a large menu, a magnet postcard, a jumbo postcards or a scratch off postcard to name a few different pieces (Unless of course you already have). In another PMQ TT string:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10464&p=71969&hilit=mail+shark+scratch#p71969

One of our Mail Shark customers reports with their Mail Shark Scratch Off Postcard “we have had a 6% redemption rate with an average ticket of $15 on the scratch offs redeemed. They are still trickling in on a steady basis”

My point is not to turn this into a “Look how great the Mail Shark is” post, but that new or different direct mail pieces may yield you the return or above the return you are looking for and give a new and fresh look to your prospects to keep their attention and get them excited.

1. Do you change the design on each ad run? If not, I would consider changing the design so that it doesn’t get stale. With Postcards specifically there is a method to the design madness similar to menu engineering. A stale design in conjunction with a design that is not created strategically is sure to diminish your potential return.
2. Do you analyze and change your coupons each run? I always recommend keeping the winners of course, 86ing the dogs and replacing the dogs with strategic coupons based on the same concepts to ones that are proven performers. You may also want to pull up the current demographical data for your mailing area. There are some strategies behind using demographics that can potentially increase redemption.

I hope this helps and I wish you the best in reaching your redemption goal. If you would like to email me your current postcard, I would be more than happy to analyze it and give you some unbiased feedback (NO STRINGS ATTACHED).

Regards,

Josh Davis
Vice President of Sales
Mail Shark
2325 Perkiomen Ave
Reading, PA 19606
Web: www.TheMailShark.com
Direct: 484-948-1611
Mobile: 484-269-3715
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