I'm about to send out my first batch of direct mail postcards advertising my website and I'd like to hear about any experiences from other website owners who've done the same thing. Research I did online suggests direct mail is a good way to reach my demographic, small businesses, and post cards are a better choice than letters because they can be read easily as soon as they are picked up by somebody. The postcards show one message covering our main selling point and the URL in large print on the front. The back contains a brief description of the site and a coupon code for signing up. We're using the coupon mainly to track return on this mailing, but it'll likely also encourage people to sign up. Can anybody share any experiences on direct mail advertising, or even offer any other methods of reaching small businesses?
I much prefer targeted email marketing over direct mail for a number of reasons: 1) Cost. 2) Effectiveness. 3) Turn around time. 4) Tracking capabilities. I've used both over the years. Direct mail is slow and expensive. Response rates are lower in my experience. Email Marketing allows me to reach a larger market with less expense. I can track my results much closer and get a much quicker response.
With email marketing I'm concerned about being seen as a spammer. I know I personally get a lot of email and quickly trash promotional stuff that I'm not expecting. I see you run an email marketing service so you may not agree with me on that point. The cost advantage of an email campaign is very clear and may be something I do once I have a list of addresses from my users, who won't perceive emails as spam. Until I have those contacts, I think a physically mailed advert is going to gain a better response for me. I am definitely not ruling email marketing out for future efforts.
What actually is the success rate in email marketing. Do you really get business through it. I would really like to do it for my website. But I would like to know the success rate. Please tell me.
I've always had good results with targeted direct mail (listing brochures mailed to companies in the area.) I plan to do some test mailings for my website this year. I think I'll use a letter with a business card enclosed. I suggest you test various formats with small quantities to see what works best. Good Luck!
Direct mailing is very effective if you are sending your ads in your opted in list... but if you are going to send it to emails you collected online (without consent of owners), you will end up spamming..
Even if it is a traditional method, direct mail marketing has its own credibility in building the bond with customer. The hidden advantage of direct marketing is that, the consumer will be invisible to the competitor. So the level of competition will be less when compared to direct marketing. This says stop to distributors, resellers and retailers. So business will be more trustable. I had a good deal with one of the direct mailing service ( Troi Mailing Service) in Toronto.
Many years ago, I was responsible for the sales and marketing efforts for a high tech company that mailed out 1,000,000+ direct mail pieces per year. They were not postcards, but tri-fold self-mailers (bigger than postcards and easier to open and read than letters. Back then, we could get as much as an 8% response rate, though typical rates were in the 2% range. Over the yeas, that dropped to less than .5% and most big mailers cut back their efforts on direct mail. That said, I am hearing that because so many companies have stopped mailing and consumers are no longer burnt out with junk mail that response rates are going back up, so it may be worthwhile to launch such a program. One additional benefit to direct mail pieces are that recipients will some times save the piece if they do not have a need right away and then get back to the company months or even years later. You won't see that happen with email spam, in my opinion.
Personally, what I did when doing B2B email campaign was to keep it short, informal with a reference/hint to the person. The trick is to be able to do batch personalised email that don't look like batch emails.I was targeting e-tailers. Ideally in the subject I will put my company name and the reason Im contacting them.They must feel like they want ot answer by reading the subject. Then in the body, no more than 8 lines, with my signature, skype, email. That's it.