Direct mailDirect mail ( direct mail) is an effective advertising of goods and services, reliable support of any advertising company .Direct mail, direct mail , is used to solve various problems:1.
To search for new customers;2. Raising the level of awareness about digging or goods (services);3. To create a whole stream of requests from your potential buyers, to whom you can call, to which you can send a sales manager for a presentation, who can come to you themselves and whom you can send to your dealers and sales representatives;4. To penetrate interesting markets and contact customers who are too far away from you, or not readily accessible to your usual sales methods;5. Create customer feedback.
The most common types of shipments via Direct mail :- letters- booklets, catalogs- magazines- price lists- souvenir products (calendars, pens, posters.)- compact di ck with presentations.- advertising and reference letters;- postcards;- flyers;- books;- Business Cards;- programs and questionnaires;Direct Benefits mail (direct mail) consists of :1. The low price of sending letters, cards, catalogs compared to other types of advertising (press, radio, TV and outdoor advertising).2. The selectivity of advertising. You can choose only those companies that will be interested in your product or service (products – restaurants, wholesale food companies, building materials – construction companies, medicines – pharmacies).
3. Without competitors (the consumer learns only about your product or service, and not about competitors’ offers like in the media or outdoor advertising). Receiving by mail a colorful booklet with a description of your services, the client perceives this as a personal appeal, and in the end, from the large number of offers, he will most likely choose yours.4. Direct mailing involves sending a large amount of information (in advertising leaflets you can specify the full list of goods and services provided by your company).7.
Confidentiality.8. Lack of territorial restrictions .10. The ability to effectively control consumer feedback.Stages of the address distribution ( Direct mail ):1. The most important stage of the address distribution is the precise definition of the target audience of potential customers.2.
Making postal items. Prepare a text and a letter mock-up or another form of your advertising message.4. Processing of promotional materials, including: packaging of promotional material in an envelope, manufacturing and sticking a sticker (address sticker).
5. Mail delivery.6. Make a sample to determine the possible volume of distribution, or order it on the side.7. After approval of the original layout and sample for you are replicated, and sent your appeal.
8. Estimate the amount of return (i.e. changed addresses) and adjust your sample.
9. Evaluate the effectiveness of your mailing and advertising messages.10. Re-send with all achievements and miscalculationsYou can use direct mail advertising to complete the sale or, at least, to transfer the negotiations to the next stage – bringing you closer to the conclusion of the transaction. Typically, the sales representative on the first attempt does not achieve a meeting with a promising client.Direct mail advertising is effective only when you have a reliable address database of your potential customers, an advertising message that you want to read and most importantly, then enter into a dialogue with you.
In addition, all your message from the envelope to the last sheet of the attachment must be performed at a good printing level, with a good design. If you have all this, then the flow of new customers is provided to you.The advantage of postal correspondence is perseverance, as well as long-term impact: the client who received the information has the opportunity to re-read, study and think about this information, return to it again if necessary at a convenient time for the recipient.
Remember, this is a direct appeal to your potential client only in writing. The former president of the Direct Mail Advertising Association, Edward N. Meyer, Jr., said: “You address the buyer or potential client individually through the most important of all the words he knows – his own name.
Basically you are trying to create the impression that you know who he is and what he is. In most texts of direct mail advertising, you speak to him as you would have said at a personal meeting. Therefore, direct mail advertising is most appropriate in a situation where a similar approach to a potential buyer is logical and justified. “The main rule of conducting mail correspondence is to address mailings to those who are interested in our offer . E If a letter is not of interest to the recipient, it will fly in the bin.
But if the letter will be valuable to the recipient, then he will read it from the beginning to the end.Today, sending “one and all” is ineffective and ruinous. Therefore, it is important to correctly draw up criteria for identifying the target consumer audience, as well as to correctly compile an address list of potential buyers.Ideally, in addition to the exact address, contact information is useful to have information about the recipient’s name, personal preferences, features, etc.Direct mail is a one-on-one contact form with your potential customer and is directly opposite to mass advertising.When directly addressing potential customers in writing, there are three powerful methods of direct exposure:-Personalization. Communication and messaging can occur one on one with your potential customers, which contributes to a more rapid establishment and development of relationships.- Focus and focus.
You address in your letter directly to those who meet your criteria: demographic, geographical indicators, characteristics of potential or existing customers, and combinations of all these elements. Other forms of marketing can not provide the same high degree of “hitting the target.”-Long-term exposure.
The recipient has the opportunity to safely read, examine the information of the letter at a convenient time for him, contact her again when the need arises, recommend to colleagues, friends, etc.It is believed that direct mail is the easiest and most comprehensible way to enter the market with minimal costs. Recently, however, this method has ceased to be cheap, and can only become effective with the right choice of recipients.Despite its high efficiency, there are a number of drawbacks to direct mail .First of all, due to shortcomings in the work of mail and courier services, not all messages reach their recipients.
In addition, the recipient of the message can simply throw it away. This happens in several cases.- If the addressee receives at once a lot of correspondence, he can automatically throw out all the advertising. To avoid this will help competent design of the envelope.
– But, even starting to read, the addressee can interrupt reading in the middle and send a letter to the basket if the content did not interest him from the first paragraphs. To prevent this from happening, the text should be easy to read, be accompanied by bright subtitles and graphic images, and also describe not so much the dignity of the company, but the benefits that the customer will receive by using her services.- Many people do not like to receive unexpected offers. Many are skeptical of what is offered.”There are people who are concerned that sending out advertisements, which usually produce recycled paper, has a negative impact on the environment.2.1 Categories of mailing lists.
Different types of direct mailings are possible for a different segment of your target market. It is important not to confuse them and take into account the characteristics of each of them.I highlight the following categories of direct mail:1. Direct mail to organizations.It is sent to the updated address database, which you have.
Such a base is formed, as a rule, consistently and purposefully as a result of working with potential and existing customers.The success of direct mail is due to 60% of the targeted address list, 30% offer, 10% creativity of your mail.But you can also create your own database if you have the necessary sources of information. Here are the two main operations for creating an address list:2. Direct targeted mailing to individuals.
Information is sent to your potential and existing customers, if your customers are individuals, i.e. retail buyers.The base for this category of mailing can be formed independently in the process.
To do this, provide a survey for buyers who have already bought something from you, as well as potential buyers. Consider how you can stimulate your clients so that they want to fill out a questionnaire, give their unique contact information. Gifts, souvenirs, coupons for exclusive discounts, coupons for participation in contests, etc. are a good incentive for this.And most importantly, you can contact your addressees using other direct marketing tools: telephone, email, fax, etc.
3. Bulk mailing.If the first two categories of mailings are possible in the presence of a unique proprietary database with complete reliable information about customers, then mass mailing is carried out according to the principle “in each mailbox”.
If you do not have your own database of loyal potential customers, mass mailing is an excellent tool for building such a database.You can send letters with promotional materials to the recipients in envelopes, or you can simply “scatter” leaflets, booklets, etc. by mailboxes.This category of mailing has a mass character – a kind of half-SPAM , in which there is no individualized approach – the key moment of the success of direct marketing.
Such a mailing is effective when sending emails to a database of recipients from 10 thousand people or more. You can count on the response from the mass mailing with a competent approach on average from 1% to 15%.Here it is important to understand that in this case, the distribution is perceived by the recipients as mass advertising.
And a satisfactory response is possible with a well-written message and sent promotional materials, as well as a properly developed strategy. In the absence of a competent and correct approach, you may not get any response at all. After all, we can not contact the addressees in other ways, because you simply will not have the necessary data for this. Here only one-way communication is possible on the part of the recipients. 3.E-Mail advertising.
E- mail advertising is the sending of e-mails (E- mail ) to the e-mail addresses of companies, organizations or individuals. It’s no secret that today abroad – Mail advertising comes to the peak of its popularity and no one doubts that at this peak it will be long enough.A few years ago, basically only large campaigns regularly used E- mail advertising in their work, now the trend has changed and small and medium businesses actively use e- mail advertising. This is due to the fact that almost all organizations already have an e-mail address (E- mail ), regardless of their size. R poison its benefits: E – Mail advertising allows you to achieve the desired market sectors, thanks to accurate targeted communications (e-mail); Provides more flexible marketing opportunities;Increases the effectiveness of other types of marketing and advertising; It is an excellent media alternative (cost effective);The absence of advertising competitors – in contrast to the media, where your advertising can get lost among advertising competitors, you can be sure that your offer will not go unnoticed; Speed ??of execution – the e-mail reaches the addressee within 5 seconds; A direct marketing tool such as sending emails is currently very effective because advertising messages reach the customer in seconds, and the cost of such a message is disproportionately small. Highlight direct marketing – creating a list of organizations that may be interested in your product (service). The most successful addresses are those companies that really need it in your products. Those interested in buying a particular product are looking for very specific offers.
Why does email newsletter advertising really work? the audience to which you send letters is already divided into subject groups; subscribers trust the one from whom they receive letters, because they themselves agreed to the newsletter; sending email advertising will never be blocked by spam filters ; the letter allows you to more clearly convey the essence of the proposal than the same contextual advertising; it is possible to reach Central Asia without large budget expenditures; You can notify your customers about company news anytime, anywhere; In the case of electronic Direct mail information is sent only by subscription. Moreover, the user must not only leave his e- mail , but also confirm this subscription from the address indicated by him. Information will subsequently be sent only to those people who left their address themselves and, thus, expressed a desire and interest in it. Due to this, the subscriber does not have a negative attitude towards what he receives, moreover, he is waiting for this content, since he himself has requested its receipt, and therefore, it is useful and necessary for him.
In addition, the user always has the opportunity to unsubscribe, thus refusing information that has ceased to interest him or has become irrelevant.In the West, e- mail marketing services exist for a long time , which send advertising information to subscribers on various topics. And the number of recipients of such messages numbers hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. Obviously, the effectiveness of such advertising – directed audience, a priori interested in this topic – is much higher than that of ordinary advertising, which operates with less clear segmentation of the audience of consumers. Electronic technology Direct mail exists and is already quite widely used in Russia.Visually, targeted electronic advertising is an advertising leaflet, made in electronic form and containing rather voluminous text, illustrations, as well as hyperlinks that can lead to various pages of the website dedicated to a particular product.One of the advantages of electronic direct mail is its low cost.
It does not require any printing or distribution costs. In addition, the newsletter can be carried out in the shortest possible time – materials can be prepared within an hour, and the distribution of letters takes a few minutes. All information, if necessary, is sent promptly, which is often very relevant with tight deadlines for advertising campaigns.In addition, when distributing targeted electronic advertising, it is possible to obtain in real time complete data on how many letters have been sent, delivered, read, what is the reaction (clicks), who responded to the message (portrait of the subscriber who clicked the link in the letter). This information can be used to assess the effectiveness of the campaign and its adjustment, as well as for a deeper marketing analysis.
ConclusionDirect mail ( direct mail ) – the most commonly used type of DM. It is characterized by high selectivity of treatment and an individual approach to the consumer, the absence of territorial restrictions, the ability to convey to the consumer more information than traditional types of advertising, high response rates, the ability to effectively control the feedback from consumers. The main drawback – the reader can throw it away without reading.In order to achieve the best results, it is recommended to include potential consumers on the mailing list, to conduct at least two mailings, and to combine the types of items.Many specialized publications offer distribution of promotional materials to all their subscribers along with the next issue of a newspaper or magazine. This is a very effective way to direct mail, as an ineffective audience is practically reduced to a minimum.
Direct mailing is desirable to produce several times, be sure to at the same time reworking the text of the letter, for example, adding it with clarifying information about the product, service or the company itself.Postal services in the field of direct marketing have long been an accessible and convenient activity that provides the flexibility, availability and selectivity of providing the necessary information. So traditional A direct mail is better to use if we want to distribute materials that should make the most “expensive” impression that can be achieved using only paper and high-quality printing. In addition, the direct mail allows you to reach the narrowest groups of people living compactly in a small city, district or quarter of a large city.In the case of an electronic direct mail campaign, you can start the campaign as soon as possible, its cost will be substantially less, since paper advertising media are not used and there is no need to resort to mail services. In addition, the e-mail capabilities allow you to get fairly accurate data on the results of the campaign – the number of readings, clicks (transitions) to the site, as well as the socio-demographic portrait of the reacted (clicked on the link) user.
So, the direct mail and electronic direct mail, being, in fact, similar tools based on conveying information directly to a potential consumer, have, nevertheless, a number of features and their own specifics. They allow you to solve various advertising and marketing tasks. Which one to choose depends on the goal of the campaign, budget, geographic focus and other parameters.
