Direct Mail and New Customers

Here, are few steps to follow for successful marketing campaign.

Identify Best Sales Leads

In order to get most response from your customers through the use of direct mail list, you need to know about your target customers. How? Let’s find out;

Find out the people with similar demographic characteristics as your best customers. You need to make up direct mail campaign that fits in your customer profiling.

Direct Mail Costs

Whenever you wrote the direct marketing program you need to consider it as it’s your last marketing campaign. You also need to consider cost components.

In direct mail marketing campaign, biggest costs are postage, ink, paper and handling.

In telemarketing campaign, biggest cost is time and line charges.

The smaller cost item is the list but the list is the hinge that has cost per lead and per sale. If you have successful list, you will get profit swings.

The comparison between cost per lead and per sale is very important. Let’s find out the difference;

Let’s take an example of 1000 piece of direct mail program. It is estimated that most telemarketing or direct mail programs spend between 45 cents - $1 per contact. It is just an idea; telemarketing can even take your more bucks. For the comparison, you need to assume cost of contact per household is 60 cents.

It means you need to spend $600 for 1000 piece of direct mail campaign.

How to Calculate Cost per Lead or Sale

The most fickle thing in direct mail marketing campaign is the response rate because it doesn’t only rely on the person who sends it, but it also depends on the design, timings and information. With perfect message, design and timings, the typical response rates can range between:

0.002% per thousand means 2 per 1000

2% per thousand – 20 per 1000

Several companies have done it in much better way. Let’s see how;

As you have received a direct mail response rate of 2%, it means your marketing campaign have generated 20 leads for your $600 investment (1000 x 60 cents).

Per lead cost rate is - only $30 = $600/20

20 lead into 5 sales.

If you get the closing ratio 25% then your cost per sale can be 600/5 = $12

The Secret of Direct Marketing Response Rate

Several marketers only focus on the response rate by counting leads. Remember, response rate is like a coin that has two sides to it – head and tail. The head side of coin is the people who said “YES” to your offer and tails are the people who said “NO” to your offer.

It is also recommended to send your message to right people that are interested in your offer. If you send your most powerful marketing message to the wrong people then all your efforts will waste and will go into the trash. But if you send an ordinary marketing message to the right people, there is a more chance to get more response from your target audience.