Direct Mail Best Practice Guide

What is Direct Mail and Physical Mail Marketing?
Direct mail is delivered physically to the addresses of your current and potential future customers. Flyers, postcards and magazines are a couple of examples.

Marketing and advertising have shifted more towards digital over the last two decades. Still, the tangibility of direct mailers has many benefits to consider, including within your marketing campaign mix.

Create a Physical Connection
A physical item, such as a direct mailer, creates significant brand engagement and offers a unique opportunity to make your message stand out. You can create a strong response when you plan and execute a direct mail campaign correctly, especially in combination with other marketing channels. Integrated campaigns create further awareness and invite your target audience to respond.

Offers or Exclusive Deals
If your campaign includes a promotional offer that prompts customers to take action, such as visiting your website or calling you, they are more likely to keep the direct mailer.

Because direct mailers can be targeted to specific individuals or groups, you have an excellent opportunity to engage with new customers and encourage action, depending on the type of services you provide. If your budget and strategy allow, you can create tailored or exclusive offers for each audience segment to improve the perceived relevance of your campaign.

With a direct mail campaign, you may have more creative options within your budget than with some other media channels. Personalised touches — such as a signature, handwritten elements, colours, textures, and images — can create strong connections with your audience and make them more memorable.

Direct Mailer Data and Target Audience Planning
No matter how effective your campaign is, it will only be successful if you target the right audience. Therefore, you need to research and understand your target audience.

If you already have a database of customers or prospects, ensure it is up-to-date and relevant. Posthub's free data health check can help with this process. If you don’t have an existing database, you may need to research the people you wish to reach or purchase relevant data to create your mailing list.

Once you have set your campaign audience and created your database of customers, you must ensure that the other elements of the direct mail campaign will encourage them to act.

• Segmentation, Targeting and Relevance

This means focusing on your audience. What are their needs or problems, and what can you offer to resolve them? Below are some examples of how you could improve your campaign response rate.

• Geographic location

Country, county, region, district, town or city. Understanding the geographical makeup of your database may allow you to segment precisely by each area.

• Demographic

Gender, age, family composition, life stage, income, or occupation. Closely tailoring your message can help recipients feel that it is relevant and impactful.

• Behaviour

Attitudes, hobbies and values. Say you want your message to raise awareness of how your business has improved its green credentials. Segmenting your audience by those who have a strong affinity for environmental issues could invite synergy and better responses.

• Sale stage

What does your target audience already know about your business, service or products? There may be differences in their awareness or purchase cycles, allowing you to segment by levels such as awareness, consideration and action.  

Direct Mail Data Health
You can speak directly to your target audience with a direct mail campaign. Your data must be clean and relevant to ensure your campaign has the desired impact. Any discrepancies in data or incorrect elements will impact your open rates and return on investment.

JICMAIL data shows that 95% of direct mail is engaged with (i.e., not discarded immediately), and 67% is read or viewed. Contact Posthub to learn more about our complimentary data health check, which ensures your campaign data supports the most positive response.

Creativity and Mailing Standout 
A physical item provides a direct mail campaign with an opportunity to stand out and create the desired interaction. Different sizes, weights, textures, formats and even envelopes can be used to grab a recipient’s attention. Posthub articles "Pushing the Envelope" and "Creative Direct Mail Ideas" both explore ways to create an interesting first impression.

Create a Call to Action
If you want your audience to take action upon receiving a direct mailer, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. The easier it is, the more likely they are to respond.

If your campaign aims to increase traffic to your website, include a short and trackable URL. A short URL is simpler for users to type directly into their web browser, while with the correct tracking measurements, you can see how the campaign has performed against KPIs.

If you want the recipient to visit a location or buy a product, ensure they understand precisely what to do and where to go. Verify that all links function as intended and that any actions outlined are visible, understandable and actionable.

Integrated Campaign Planning
As a direct mailer is a physical item, you can create a halo approach using other media channels or integrate the direct mailer into your broader campaign planning. This could be as simple as using your social media platforms to ‘boost’ related content to an audience with interests that match those of your mailing audience.

Direct mailers can even be a warm-up piece for other digital channels. If you have obtained marketing consent from your audience, consider following up your direct mail campaign with a direct email to amplify the message. Alternatively, if sent after a specified time lag, it could serve as a reminder to ‘get in touch’ or ‘buy now’.

Demonstrate Trust
Your campaign creative can both support your message and demonstrate trust and authority. For example, case studies and customer quotes demonstrate success and positive feedback, and exclusive offers can cater to the audience’s needs or wants. Whatever you communicate, your audience is more likely to respond if they understand the potential benefits the item or service will give them and how well it has worked for others.

Measure and Test
Once you have established what you want recipients to do when they receive your direct mail campaign, you should then set performance metrics to measure success against. These are the intended results of your campaign, which may include the number of people who visited the website, purchased the product, or redeemed the exclusive offer.

As in many advertising channels, several elements influence responsiveness to direct mail. Therefore, it may be helpful to create tests within the direct mail campaign to see which elements create stronger responses within each target segment.

Test variables could include:

• Target audience
• Envelope or mailing format
• Headlines
• Offers
• Colours or creative imagery

Test segments should have a substantial number of recipients and be comparable in terms of audience and timeframe of receipt. This ensures that the tests are as fair as possible.

Direct Mail Legal Responsibilities
When using physical mail marketing, it is essential to review several compliance elements to ensure your campaign complies with relevant guidelines and laws.

Useful links for compliance support include:

• Privacy and electronic communications regulations for direct marketing (Information Commissioner's Office)
• Advertising Mail Guide (DMA)
• Marketing and advertising law (GOV.UK)
• Mailing Preference Service (MPS)

How Posthub Can Help with Your Direct Mail Campaign
We are here to help. Posthub offers hands-on support for direct mail campaigns. With over 100 years of combined experience, our team simplifies the complex, providing quick and easy support across all your mailing campaigns. From the start, you have a dedicated account manager who is your single point of contact, able to meet all your needs.

We are fully committed to every one of our customers and will help you by planning direct mail and managing postal delivery. Make your direct mail campaigns work harder with Posthub.