4 Tips to Attracting New Customers in Your Community with Direct Mail

4 Tips to Attracting New Customers in Your Community with Direct Mail

The best use for direct mail, especially in retail, is to get current customers to keep coming back and spending more. That said, businesses need a marketing strategy for attracting new customers. Here are 4 great tips to making direct mail work:

The Smaller Your Trade Area, The More Direct Mail Works.
Typically direct mail works on a smaller scale than traditional media like TV or Print. My instinct is that the number is about 20,000 households. The easiest way to figure out the number of households in your trade area is to go to an online list service like www.printz.com and use their free count system. You can enter the geography that corresponds to your trade area, then the demographics of your targeted customer. If the number is less than 20,000, direct mail could be a good fit. If the number is larger, it may be more cost effective to use more traditional mass media. A few things to keep in mind: Don't over estimate your geography; the longer the travel time, the less likely people are to shop your business. Don't over estimate your demographics; be honest about the likelihood of attracting people in age, income or gender groups that normally don't shop your business.

Provide An Offer, But Also An Event.
After the mailing list, the offer is the biggest driver of direct mail success. You always want a great offer to get customers to respond, but you also don't want to look like a chronic discounter. Overall discounting lessens the perceived quality of your product or service. To counter balance the perception of discounting, you should try to wrap your offer in an event. Events can simply include holidays like Christmas or Labor Day, community events like Crazy Days or Sidewalk Sales, or trade events like Sample Sales or End of Season Sales. The best events can be the ones you develop yourself like a guest celebrity appearance, a charity event, or a themed community event. The more you can wrap your sale or offer into an event, the less you need to discount, and the more you protect your core pricing and perceived product quality.

It Takes 7 Impressions to Make a Sale.
The rule of thumb in marketing is that on average a new customer will have been exposed to you brand 7 times. There is also research that shows that the more a person sees your brand, the more that person thinks favorably about your brand. So frequency matters. If you don't "touch" your targeted customer continually over time, your marketing won't reach it's maximum effectiveness. With direct mail as well as other media, you should have a plan in place to touch the same people multiple times throughout the year. A good rule of thumb for direct mail is 4 times per year. Other impressions can come from other types of media, but also word-of-mouth, drive-bys of a retail location, or public relations campaigns. Lastly, avoid using too many media types. If you try direct mail, then print, then radio, you will tend to make single impressions on many people, but not frequent impressions on the same people; you never get to the 7 impressions.

Test for an Ongoing Marketing System.
The goal with any marketing is to develop "marketing systems" that you can put into your annual marketing budget and use over and over again. A marketing system is one that has been proven to have good results and an acceptable return on investment. To get there you need to measure and test. Direct mail is usually the easiest of the media types to test; you mail out and measure the response. A few things to keep in mind: To be statistically relevant the test needs to be large enough. A rule of thumb is to mail at least 3,000 pieces, 5,000 is better. Not all new customers will bring in the offer on a direct mail piece; some people don't like bringing in coupons and some simply forget. Finally, remember that frequency matters. If you can get a reasonable response with a first test, subsequent mailings will only get better.