Saving money on direct mail

Advice on saving money on direct mail mailshots by careful planning - Contact us now

A pound saved is a pound earned. Very few mailings or mailshots make such a vast amount of money that the cost of the mailing is unimportant. Every penny spent on a direct mail campaign should be carefully planned for maximum effect. Direct mail mailshots, if handled carefully, is an extremely efficient form of marketing. Saving money on direct mail is critical to your success. Most people who send successful mailings have remembered the following points.

Save money on direct mail mailshots by:
1. Careful targeting. It is critical that your mailing lands on the right doormat. Your job is to minimise the number of mailings that go straight in the bin. Your mailing should only go to people who will be potentially interested in your product or service. If you are offering credit cards or loans, that may be almost anyone. If you sell cake decorating supplies, very few men (or younger women) would be interested in your products. So do not mail to them. You can target even closer. Readers of a magazine called "Sugarcraft" would almost all be interested in your products. The secret of careful targeting is in using the right mailing list.

2. Use the correct method of posting. Mailings of 4000 or over (1000 for larger packets) can utilise the Mailsort 700 service. With clean data, postage discounts of up to 27% are available. You need to talk to a professional mailing house such as Data Consultants about this. Their charges to clean and Mailsort your list will always be less than the savings you make on postage. See our advice section on Mailsort.

3. Plan your mailing well in advance. Jobs done in a rush tend to cost more. You will need to plan each aspect and component of your mailing well ahead. You will need:

a. Sales letters. Most mailings contain a personalised sales letter or personalised order form. See our advice page on writing sales letters.

b. Envelopes. Most mailings are sent in C5 or DL envelopes. For small mailings, you can buy from Viking Direct or your local stationer. For larger mailings or for the keenest price, Data Consultants also sell, plain and printed business envelopes. For even larger mailings, you will need pre-printed mailing wallets, rather than envelopes. Mailing wallets are designed to work in the automated machinery that mailing houses use. These must be printed with a Printed Postage Impression for the service that you intend to use and with a return address, so that you can remove "gone-aways" from your mailing list. A good mailing house can handle this for you and will also have their own rented PO Box reply address that you can use for the "gone-aways" if you wish. One little tip. Print "Urgent" or "Urgent Order" on the reply envelope. This gives the impression that you will deal with the contents immediately.

c. A mailing list of suitable recipients. You may already already have this list, in the form of existing customers, members or enquiries. If not, choose a mailing list with care, from a reputable supplier.

d. Sales literature. Most mailings enclose some kind of sales literature. This may be a simple single sided leaflet or a complex catalogue or brochure. make sure that you leave yourself enough time to order this. Most printers will need around one week to produce a simple leaflet from finished artwork supplied on disk, or longer of they are doing the design work as well. Catalogues and price lists will take longer. Data Consultants supply printing as part of the package, at very keen prices. Our A5 mailers are just the thing for an ecomomy mailing as the price seven includes the postage!

e. The reply element. This should be a reply paid envelope or a reply paid card. Again, allow about a week for print production - more if design work is needed. See our advice page on reply elements.

Why saving money on direct mail is important
The advantage of direct mail over other, more traditional, forms of marketing, such as newspaper and magazine advertising, is that you have total control. You can easily calculate just how much each mailing is costing you. This means that you can then easily work how much each sale is costing you. This then means that you can then decide just how much to spend each year on acquiring new business, growing your business at exactly the speed that you and your staff feel you can handle. Few other businesses (such as retail) have that luxury. They have to invest huge amounts of money in premises and staff before they know how much they will make out of it. By saving money on direct mail, you can make it work well for you.

Thank you for reading this article, which, hopefully has proved useful to you. If you would like further advice on any specific aspect of leaflet production or direct mail, please feel free to contact us. Or fill in our secure enquiry form for help, advice or a quotation on your own project or requirements.

Please feel free to reproduce this article elsewhere if you wish, as long as all links remain intact.

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