Top 5 Direct Mail MISTAKES | How to Improve Campaign ROI

Even the most powerful marketing channels can fail if implemented poorly.

While direct mail is a powerhouse when it comes to personalization and emotional impact, oftentimes marketing agencies treat the advertising medium like an afterthought.

Or worse – they only see it as a viable strategy for the local pizza joint.

While everyone may enjoy the occasional coupon, direct mail has the potential to be so much more. If done correctly, this channel can be the backbone of a business’s marketing portfolio.

That being said, here are 5 common mistakes businesses make when creating a direct mail campaign:

1.) Only Tracking Response Rates – And Ignoring Other Data Points

Survivorship bias is prevalent in most forms of marketing, in the sense that many agencies only focus on the positive responses from a campaign rather than the overall result.

Marketers tend to dedicate a lot of time and effort into understanding the households that became sales, while ignoring everyone else.

That is not to say one should ignore the response rate, since more sales is the primary goal for any business. But marketers should also examine why their mailers did not resonate with every household that was targeted.

With direct mail, it is important to examine and limit the audiences that did NOT respond well to your marketing message.

By understanding the circumstances that determine a response – or lack of response – marketers can adjust their campaign as needed. 

2.) Lack of Personalization

Because direct mail has the name and address of each recipient, there are many ways to add customization to their campaign mailer.

A more personalized experience to marketing has been shown to greatly affect the success of a campaign. For example, addressing a recipient by name has shown to increase response rates by 135%. 

Despite the incredible power of customization, many inexperienced marketers will create a quick, generic postcard designed for mass production.

These campaigns are dull and uninspired, and the effect can be noted in the response rates. 

3.) Not enough CTA Mediums

While most advertising mediums are very limited on their CTAs within their ad, direct mail can promote several at the same time. Marketing channels like display ads, YouTube videos, and even billboards oftentimes only offer a link to click or a phone number to call.

But with direct mail, there are many ways to encourage better response rates by offering customers multiple methods of contact.

Whether it be a phone number, a QR code, or a secured return envelope, leads can choose their preferred channel to signal their interest.  

4.) Too Much Mail Volume

The outdated approach to direct mail is to deliver your message to every house within a specified zip code or sales location. While this approach may work for a localized pizza joint, this strategy suffers from overspending on a larger scale or for a niche industry.

Sending mail to every house regardless of how likely they are to become a customer leads to too much mail volume without a viable response rate to justify the postage cost.

Rarely does the cost of acquisition surpass the cost of print and postage used to send to every home within a district.

As marketers, finding the balance between reaching EVERY potential prospect vs reaching MOST prospects all comes down to your targeted approach.

Instead of delivering to every household, your campaigns should identify ideal prospects prior to your first launch to reduce overall mail volume. 

5.) No Remarketing Attempts

Oftentimes when people test a new direct mail campaign, they will use up most of their budget on one large campaign to reach the most people.

Perhaps they receive enough responses to warrant a second campaign, but rarely do they send another mailer to the households that did not respond to the initial campaign.

The fact of the matter is that additional touchpoints may be necessary to turn a prospect into a viable lead.

While direct mail has one of the longest advertising lifespans – therefore offering more touchpoint opportunities within the home – sometimes a remarketing campaign is necessary to lock in a final sale.