In the age of internet marketing it’s easy to overlook more traditional mediums like good old fashioned mail. For many types of business this might make sense but before you rule it out for your own business take a closer look at how to leverage a direct mail campaign and some benefits of doing so.
Direct mail campaigns allow you to create marketing materials beyond subject line and copy. You can design an entire 3 dimensional object to put in your target audience’s hands and the choices you make can have a huge impact. Your direct mail piece can be in an attention grabbing color, it can contain product samples or promotional items. In short, it affords you the opportunity to make a much larger impact than digital communication can offer.
Below are examples of a few cases where direct mail campaigns made a lot of sense:
1. A skincare company I’ve done marketing for in the past designed a campaign to promote a new line of roll-on fragrances. Since this sort of thing can’t be sampled through the internet, the company sent out perfume samples to every customer who purchased from them in the last 6 months. In the sample packages the company included a coupon for 10% off any purchase of the new roll-on fragrances. The benefits of the coupon were two-fold. To begin with, it gave customers a money saving incentive to purchase if they enjoyed the samples. The other advantage of the coupon is that it allowed for tracking the success of the campaign. The coupon code that went out in the direct mail piece was only given to those customers so when orders came in with that coupon code, the skincare company knew they were getting sales from the direct mail campaign.
2. An interior design firm that catered to home owners with properties worth over 1 million dollars designed a campaign to entice new home owners to use their services. The firm made a favorable introduction with new home buyers by mailing them a “housewarming” direct mail piece. The firm put together gift baskets containing pens with their web address and phone number, brochures of past jobs they’d done and fresh baked cookies from a local bakery. To offset the costs of this direct mail piece the firm also included a value-pak type coupon pack for local vendors such as restaurants and dry cleaners. Each vendor participating in the welcome pack contributed to the expense of printing the coupons and mailing the packages. (Note that this case includes not only a smart use of direct mail marketing, but also employs the power of cross-promotion to offset the cost of the direct mail campaign!)
The costs for direct mail can certainly add up quickly so it’s a strategy that you’ll want to use sparingly most of the time. That said, for a big impact campaign or the promotion of a product that needs to be sample, direct mail can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers or wooing existing ones.
Editor’s note: Thanks, ReviewPage.com, for telling your visitors about Brand Torrent.
If you’re new to the world of cross-promotion, you may be wondering where to start. How do I select a partner? How do I come up with a cross-promotion plan? What should I keep in mind when making these decisions? We’ll tackle the basics of these issues today, so you have a clearer understanding of how to get started.
Using the search tools on Brand Torrent, you’ll be able to look for companies that are interested in cross-promotion. The best partner for you is going to have a similar customer demographic, but not necessarily a similar product line. Think about your typical customer. How old are they? Are they men or women? What are their interests? What sort of household income and education are they likely to have? Once you’ve answered these questions about your own customers, you want to find a business with customers who fit a similar description. If you sell contemporary high-end jewelry and your average customer is female, style-conscious, 25-40 years old and middle to high-income, you want to connect with a partner whose customers also fit this description.
The next thing you’ll want to keep in mind when selecting a cross-promotion partner is a fair exchange. If you’re interested in trading promotional mail order inserts and you only ship 5 orders in an average day, you shouldn’t partner with a company that ships 50 orders in an average day. Make sure that you can match whatever exposure you’re hoping to get from your cross-promotion partner in return.
Once you’ve selected a cross-promotion partner, it’s a good idea to talk about what your cross-promotional activities will encompass. If you’re going to mention each other’s websites in your customer newsletters, agree to dates on which the newsletters will be going out. Discuss the actual copy that will appear in the newsletters. To keep a productive and positive working relationship with your cross-promotion partner, it’s important to chart a specific plan of action for your cross-promotion activities, and talk about your expectations.
The next thing to consider with your cross-promotion plans is tracking your success. You’ll want some way to measure the results you’re getting from this form of marketing. You may want to attach a coupon code to your cross-promotion efforts so that you’ll know which customers made purchases through your cross-promotion campaign. You may want to provide a special URL on your site for your cross-promotion audience so you’ll know how much traffic your campaign brought in. There are a variety of ways to track the success of your marketing efforts, so you’ll want to come up with something that works for your own situation.
The final thing to keep in mind about cross-promotion is that it’s like any other type of marketing; the goal is not just to get immediate conversions, it’s also to gain exposure for your brand. Just because you didn’t see an overnight jump in sales based on your cross-promotion efforts doesn’t mean the efforts were wasted. Getting your brand in front of your target audience is the way to begin building a relationship with your customer base. These relationship-building exercises will bring you more business in the long-run than any short-term oriented marketing campaign that focuses only on immediate increases in conversions.
