Direct mail marketing

Dundalk Daily

Its probably one of the most successful parts of the marketing mix but how much difference does having a name/address on the mail shot as opposed to a very focused leaflet coming in the door. I know the one with the address is a little more personal but in many cases when the recipient knows what it is they wont open it if they are not interested. In the case of a leaflet/literature the recipient has at least probably read it before they throw it in the bin. Does anyone have any opinion or even experience of these type of campaigns.

Sonnenblumen

Dundalk Daily wrote:

Its probably one of the most successful parts of the marketing mix but how much difference does having a name/address on the mail shot as opposed to a very focused leaflet coming in the door. I know the one with the address is a little more personal but in many cases when the recipient knows what it is they wont open it if they are not interested. In the case of a leaflet/literature the recipient has at least probably read it before they throw it in the bin. Does anyone have any opinion or even experience of these type of campaigns.

Not sure I'd agree with your claim. Targeted marketing success rate is approx 2-3% and would generally be considered more successful than a simple leaflet campaign. The latter is commonly referred to as Junk mail and not surprising practically all of it ends up with other junk (in the bin). An important consequence for the advertiser apart from no success is the potential for JM to alienate a prospective customer for ever!

Cheap advertising can be very costly over the longer term.

growler

I've done a lot of testing over the years on such campaigns, for example mailing the subscribers of a magazine with a brochure outperforms simply inserting the same bochure in the magazine.

Most people don't even bother to view leaflets and most will empty a magazine of all fliers n opening it, but a personalised letter that looks important will always get a higher response in my experience.

radooo

Dundalk, you have to be very careful with direct mail marketing since you do not want to interfere with other people privacy - especially these days. Anyway, there are some good marketing books out there worth looking at ;-)

As for your question, traditional MM consists of 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and direct mail marketing sits somewhere very below of promotion with very low success rate. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and everything depends on the nature of the business.