Tips on direct mail marketing

If you plan to use direct mail marketing as one of your business's forms of marketing you will need to take a second to learn about direct mail marketing. This is important because in order for direct mail marketing to be effective it will need to be used correctly.

Here are some tips to keep in mind if you plan to use direct mail marketing.

Tip one:
Make it clear in your marketing message what you expect your recipients to do and what they can expect you to do. You will also need to make sure that you follow through with your end of the deal, if you do not follow through with what you have promised your customers will not trust you. Having no trust will ruin your customer relationships and can ruin your business because of word of mouth advertising. For example, if you have said you will never sell your subscription list to a third party; do not sell it no matter how much money you are offered. Selling that list can violate a person's privacy and ruin your trust with your customers, which can cause you to lose business.

Tip two:
Most people are not going to take the time to read the entire letter that you enclosed, they are most likely going to scan the letter. To help people pay attention to what you are saying while scanning the letter you are going to need to break up the long writing with subheadings. This will allow certain sections to stand out, and can allow people to read the parts they are interested in. You can also break up the writing by including pictures or other graphics. This works because the scanning reader's eyes will stop and look at the picture that you have included, which means they have to go back and find where they left off.

Tip three:
You need to keep the length of the letter in mind because everybody is going to have an opinion about what is too long and what is too short. Do not pay attention to what other people say, you need to make sure that when writing the letter you do not stop writing until you have said everything that you need to say. For example, if it takes two pages then you will need to use two pages. If you can fit everything onto a postcard, use a postcard.

Tip four:
You will need to design something that can be easily mass-produced, which is what you will be using to get old and new customers back into your business. You can use a letter or a postcard that contains some kind of an incentive to encourage people to some into your store. For example, you can include a coupon that offers your customers to save a percentage or flat dollar amount off their next transaction or you can offer them so much off if they spend so much money, the more money they spend the bigger the amount they get to take off.

Tip five:
Make sure that you edit the letter before you mass-produce it. The best thing that you can do is to set the copy aside for at least a day if not two. After some time has passed, you need to read the copy aloud and make notes on where it sounds awkward or where the words don't seem to flow right. Make the fixes and read the copy aloud again. If possible, you should have somebody read the copy to you so that you can actually hear how it sounds aloud which is more accurate than you reading it to yourself.