Maybe you heard fireworks, watched the ball drop in Times Square, or donned a sparkly hat and oversized glasses. Whichever way you celebrated the new year, one question lingers: What can you do to improve your business in 2017? With a new beginning, it is time to reflect on your New Year’s Resolutions. If one of those was to grow your business, using direct mail marketing with a targeted mailing list is a great way to achieve that growth. Here are a few items to consider:
- Establish a Clear Marketing Plan
Begin the new year by outlining your marketing plan. What can you support with your current budget? How often will you mail your marketing materials? It is important to develop a schedule early on so that you have a consistent stream of potential clients coming into your pipeline. Sporadic marketing can lead to gaps in response and make your successful deals difficult to predict. This can create an unreliable or unstable intake of revenue. Without stable profits, business expenses become difficult to handle. Avoid this issue by creating a marketing schedule, taking seasonality into account, and executing your plan as intended. Your plan should include how many pieces to send, the number of times person on your mailing list, and also the type of mail pieces for each touch of your marketing campaign including yellow letters, typed letters, stationery marketing letters and postcards.
- Make An Extra Effort to Secure a Quality Mailing List
Your mailing list can greatly affect the success of your direct mail marketing campaign. Research your mailing list source to ensure you are sending mail to the best suited audience for your mail piece. To begin, you need to know how many people have access to the mailing list you plan on using, especially if you are in a competitive area. Ask your mailing list provider if they run suppression on their data (how many people have access to their leads?). At YellowLettersComplete.com we suppress our data for six months. That means any leads we give to a person we will remove from our database and not give those same leads to anyone else for the next six months. Once you have found a reputable provider, ask what filters are available to help target a specific audience. Taking these few extra steps can vastly increase your response rate.
- Test Your Area and Be Open to Any Necessary Adjustments
It is important to test your area. Before blindly jumping into your preferred area, try sending a test round of your mail piece. The more you send, the more reliable your results will be. If you see a negative trend in response rate, adjust your marketing strategy. This may mean sending follow-up mail pieces, changing your target audience or mailing list filters, or even testing a different area. Once you have found an area that performs well, send to larger quantities of names and also send follow-up letters to get the most out of your area.
Learn more about how to choose your mailing list here or contact us today to set up your first direct mail marketing campaign of the new year!
