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Before deciding where to buy the postcards, it is very important to determine the Total Cost of the marketing campaign, as the postcard is not the most important cost. In a do it yourself approach you have to review 4 factors as it can be seen in the following pie chart.
- Postage: are the cost of the postage stamp.
- Labor cost: is the time spent on printing labels, sticking labels and sticking postage stamps.
- Postcard: is the cost of a small postcard (based on 500 pieces price) and includes shipping.
- Labels: is the label cost and printing cost.
If we analyze the same scenario but changing the number of postcards to 1.000, we will see that labor cost, labels and postage will raise their relative importance, while postcard cost reduce it percentage. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, as your marketing campaign gets bigger, postcard cost will reduce its importance.
With this approach, you have a Total Cost of Campaign of approximately $ 0.65 per postcard! That is more than 60% over our Direct Mailing Postcards service.
In this analysis we assumed that you already have the mailing addresses and the design, as they both represent additional costs that have to be taken into account.
How many times have you thought on how to improve your direct marketing response rates? Moreover, how many times have you have a great idea that you could not implement because your printer told you that your request was unachievable?
Following are some concepts and tips on response rates that you could apply to your marketing campaigns.
In order to get a response from a customer, your marketing piece has to go through the following stages:
- Get it delivered to the right address,
- Have something interesting in order to catch your customer's eye, and
- Communicate the right message about your product or service.
Usually most of the efforts are focus on the third step although the two preceding ones will determine if the customer is able to get there. This is where many direct mailing campaigns fail.
1. Improving your mail accuracy
As information collected from different sources is not always accurate, it is advised to run a Delivery Point Validation (DPV) process to your mailing before sending your pieces out, as there is a big change of having an important percentage of returned mail. This process will generate saving on the quantities of mailing pieces that you print and in postage you spend, or it can find mailing address errors that ones they are identify you can take action on them.
2. Catchy mailing piece
Depending on the customer, your mail piece has very little time to catch your customer's attention, as each individual is overwhelmed with hundreds of direct marketing pieces per month. This is one of the most decisive moments in a direct mailing campaign. Enhancing your mail visibility can be achieved by different techniques: some of them that focus on a general piece and some of them that target each individual.
In a general piece approach, the designer works with the colors (they have meanings and effect on a person's emotions), representative photographs, and clear and concise text messages. As it is a general piece, it will generate different reactions on each customer, as they are unique.
On a targeted approach, the designer works with specific data of each customer creating unique pieces for each one. This way it is more likely that the piece will catch the customer's eye. To review examples of this approach you can access our Advanced Marketing section.
3 The right offering for the customer
Having reach this far, it is a matter of having the right products and services that the customer is looking for. They have to be presented in a very compelling way, as you do not have much time for the first impression.
Through Advanced Marketing you have the possibility to offer different products to different customers based on known information. With this approach, you can boost your campaign response rates.
In this stage, the customer can take three different stances: he can do nothing because he is not interested in the product, we can act right away because he likes the product and he wants it now, or he can do nothing although he likes the product but it is not the right moment or he needs time to think. Through a special offering, the last stance can be accelerated.
