Facts About Direct Mail You Should Know.

#1. Direct Mail is more popular with the “younger generation” than you think… Research from ICOM’s 2010 study of North American consumers’ marketing communication channel preferences showed that the always coveted and desirable 18-34 year-old demographic prefers to learn about marketing offers via direct mail than social media platforms. Seems social media to them is just that a place to socialize not read about products and services.

#2. How can you hit a moving target. Are your prospects and customers on Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? All or none of the above? Are they watching TV, when are they listening to radio, are they surfing channels? The point is while electronic media is here to stay, the one place you can ALWAYS find your prospects and customers is their home. People like getting mail. There are ways to increase open rates and ways to design post cards so that they get noticed. The fact is usually only you will be in the mail box with little or none of your competition. Have you noticed the endless commercial breaks on TV & Radio with back-to-back commercials. The internet is worse. It has turned into a flashing array of advertising not to mention exposure to viruses and other malware. It is more difficult than ever to get the attention of customers and prospects.

#3 With Direct Mail you can zero in on whom it is you want to zeroed in on… say that 3 times fast. The point is you can target specifically by a demographic, psychographic and geographic profile so that your message can go to who is likely to be buy your product, service or wares. In this over-advertising society targeting is more important than ever.

#4 Direct Mail allows the recipient to get all touchy and feely, if they want to of course… all kidding aside, nothing will EVER replace the feeling being able to hold something in your hands and refer back to it time and again without having to enter a user name and password each time. Designed properly your direct mail piece jumps out and grabs attention. According to recent survey if given a choice people would rather read the printed word than something on a computer monitor.

There are several forms of direct mail advertising. Post cards are affordable and can be printed in full colors and on a variety of papers. Self mailing brochures printed in full colors are a great way to make your message pop. Brochures also give you more room the display your products. If you design a self mailer you can also save envelope costs. Sales letters are very effective for both business to business and consumer mailings. Of course there are other designs of mailers, check mailers, shipping envelope mailers. All are effective and do have specials applications.

To sum up all the above, direct mail is here to stay. More and more businesses are moving back to direct mail as a way to increase sales.

Mark Hale