Repeating successful direct mail campaigns is never a problem, just as long as you transform and tweak slightly beforehand.

The relationship between you and your customer is very important and vital to your success.

By repeating contact with your customer through different platforms, for example, over the phone, via email/direct mail or even face to face, your customer can establish familiarity and loyalty to your brand.

By combining several methods of customer relationship management with clever, informative and meaningful marketing, you can ensure that the customer will want to receive your mail.

People Love Repetition!

The human brain is programmed to be comfortable around anything we recognise.

Customers respond better to marketing messages from brands that they have a strong awareness of.

As repetition has been proven to be a success within direct mail, you could opt to send the same mailshot repeatedly over time to the same database.

However, it would be much better to vary your campaign and build onto or follow up past mailshot campaigns.

Using variation sparks interest and gives your direct mail an edge that will help to reinforce your brand.

One way to vary the mailshots you send would be to change the type of direct mail you use, for instance sending a postcard and then following this up with a letter later.

By varying the deals and offers you include in your campaign the customer will always have a reason to look and see what you’re offering this time

Brand Reinforcement and Multi-Channel Repetition

Multi-channel marketing campaigns are very effective.

For example, backing up a TV ad with a direct mail piece, which is a common example of an effective campaign usually driven by charities for themed campaigns.

You could also use multi-channel repetitive marketing to back up your direct mail campaign by sending marketing emails, pay per click adverts, billboard posters, newspaper ads etc.

The most important thing to do is to integrate your marketing campaigns as it is the most effective method of marketing. By integrating your campaigns, you can maximise your brand’s exposure; this will also make your customers more likely to notice you as you’re making your brand visible across a range of marketing channels.

If you have an interest in finding out how repetition and multi-channel marketing can help your next direct mail campaign, please feel free to get in contact with us the Direct Mail Company today sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk or follow us on Facebook.

You can personalise your direct mail in a lot of different ways, so we’ve narrowed this down to the ones we think will be the most effective.

Personal Information- This is using personal information within your direct mail. It includes:

• Gender- If it is likely that there would be a difference in gender response from your mailshot tailor your direct mail to appeal to men and women individually.
• Name and Address- This is the simplest form of personalisation. This shows awareness of your customer’s name and address and shows that it is not just a piece of mass mail. 

Personalised offers and Promotions-  This is using knowledge of your customer and their purchasing patterns to use direct mail to target them directly:

• Include an Offer- Include discount vouchers or coupon codes that relate to your customer and are personalised to their interests or past purchases.
• Upselling and Cross-selling- Offer and promote upgrades and add-ons to the customer’s previous purchases and promote related products/services to previous purchases.

Segmenting your Customers- Segmenting your customer database will be a massive help in delivering a personalised direct mail campaign.

It would help if you practised how you segment your data so that you’re able to personalise based on the segmented information, e.g. business to business customers should be treated differently to business to consumer customers.

You can segment your data by behavioural patterns like purchasing history or by where they live, by doing this it promotes and develops brand loyalty.

For more information on our direct mail services or bulk postage rates by the Direct Mail Company, please feel free to get in contact today sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk or follow us on Facebook.

To build an effective bulk postage strategy, you’ll need more than just a brilliant idea; you need to get the detail behind it right beforehand.

To ensure that your campaign succeeds, you must make sure to test the elements of it and make the correct refinements before sending it out to your mailing list.

To help you, we’ve listed some ways you can improve your strategy with planning and preparation.

Who is your Target Market?

The first thing you have to do is make sure you know precisely who your target market is.

It doesn’t matter what product you’re selling or what service you’re offering; you need to have an ideal customer in mind.

By doing this, only then will you then be able to develop an effecting bulk postage strategy.

Break down your mailing list

Many savvy businesses will identify their target market by breaking it down and segmenting it. By putting all your possibilities into different categories, you will be able to send out better-targeted mailings, therefore generating a much higher response rate.

You can break down your mailing list in several different ways, like by postcode, last purchase, new customers and existing customers etc. It’s best to try it out and see which way works best for your business.

Try out new ideas

You can maximise response levels to your bulk postage by testing out new ideas regularly.

By trialling marketing methods like different designs, personalised customer recommendations and integrating technology, you can see for yourself which methods generate a higher response rate from your customers.

Don’t forget to include a strong call to action that will make what you’re offering your recipients impossible to say no to.

If you’re finding it hard to plan your bulk postage strategy don’t hesitate to contact the Direct Mail Company today to help you develop your winning campaign! sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk

Mailing Christmas Cards

So it’s that time of year again when companies start to look at options of mailing Christmas cards.

The usual options are discussed before looking into mailing physical cards (like last year) when realising that sending an email just gets moved to trash within seconds of reaching the recipient’s inbox.

If you are reading this, then I am sure that many of you have been in the position where you remember previous years that you have done mailing of Christmas cards… Yes, that’s right, where it takes you a few hours to find the right designer, envelope supplier, printer, most cost-effective postage option and then delegate the task of enclosing them all when they all arrive.

All of those labels that you have to print (not forgetting using mail merge for the first time in 12 months), running out of ink, or even worse – clogging the office printer up! It takes much longer than first anticipated that’s for sure.

After the labels come to the enclosing – maybe 80 per hour if you are fast, and after each hour you start to wonder what exactly is in that distasteful envelope gum that you have been licking and sticking.

So what’s easier? Ordering envelopes, franking them and then enclosing some Christmas cards that you think your clients would like? Maybe that will suffice for some, but if you are going to be mailing Christmas cards this year, we have a solution for you.

We provide a full end-to-end service, from design, print, machine enclosing at 4,000 per hour and some of the lowest postage rates you can find for mailing Christmas cards.

What about our prices? Here’s a pricing example:

A4 folded to A4 350gsm silk litho printed card, double-sided, full colour
Creased, then folded and enclosed into an:
A5 envelop with a personalised address
Posted via Whistl / Royal Mail on a 2-3 day service
50 – 200 – 95p per Christmas card
200 – 500 – 75p per Christmas card
500 – 4000 – 57p per Christmas card
4000+ 49p per Christmas card

A second class stamp is 56p

Mailing Christmas cards doesn’t have to be expensive and stressful!

Contact us today to discuss how we can mail your Christmas cards – sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk

To see a range of Christmas card mailing options, please visit our dedicated page here: www.thedirectmailcompany/Christmas-card-mailings/

Direct mail is one of the most effective techniques to engage with your customers, but if you’re still looking to increase your response rates, we’ve got 6 important tips to help you.

1- Use an eye-catching, professional design

If your mailshot looks basic, boring or like your common advertising ‘junk mail’, people will be very unlikely to open it, let alone read it. By giving your mail an attractive, professional design and layout, it will automatically look more appealing to the recipient, the more appealing your mail looks, the more likely people are to open and engage with it.

2- Make sure your direct mail is personalised

One of the most effective ways to get people to read your direct mail is to address them directly within it, adding that personal touch. You can also choose to add personal content within your mail that will appeal to the individual customer, for instance, by giving them product recommendations based on what they have bought from you previously. A survey by Ricoh found that 98% of consumers think personalisation is important, and 56% said they would be more inclined to use a retailer if offered a good personalised experience. By personalising a customer’s direct mail, you are showing customers that you know them, which is a great way of increasing your response rates.

3- Give your Customer an Incentive

If anything will make someone take action- it’s giving them an incentive. If the aim of your direct mail is for people to read it and then buy your products, then why not include a discount voucher to put towards doing so? Recipients are more likely to visit your website, shop etc. if you make it easy for them to do so, like giving them a voucher so they know they would be saving money by shopping with you. Companies like Amazon prime and Netflix also use this technique by offering free trials to their services to make people more likely to engage with their direct mail.

4- Integrate your direct mail into a bigger marketing campaign

You can easily increase response rates by integrating your direct mail campaign within a broader marketing campaign. For example, 51% of people surveyed by Royal Mail said that they prefer receiving both direct mail and email. By targeting customers through email marketing and social media as well as through direct mail, your chances of getting through are much higher.

5- Use a call to action that will make an impact

It would help if you were direct and straight to the point in your mailshot, tell the recipient what you want them to do after they read your mail. The use of strong calls to action like ‘Call us today to receive a quote’ will give people more encouragement to respond. Using phrases like ‘Act fast, massive savings available now’ also implies some kind of urgency in your direct mail, which will make them want to take action quickly.

6- Integrate your mail with technology

Technology is very much taking over nowadays, so by adding things like QR codes to your direct mail, it makes it much easier for people to access your website and increase your response rate. In an eMarketer report published in September 2017, it was said that there would be 42.5 million UK smartphone users this year and that two-thirds of the UK’s population will own a smartphone by 2019. They also said at least 35.6 million people, or more than half of the UK population, will use a tablet at least monthly in 2017. With so many people having such easy access to tablets and smartphones, integrating your direct mail with technology like QR codes would be a very easy and simple way of getting customers to engage with your business.

If you’re looking for a reputable mailing house to help with your direct mail campaign, call us at the Direct Mail Company today on 0808 2533 836 or email sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk for more information on our direct mail and bulk postage services.

Are you thinking about taking a bulk mailing route with your marketing campaign?

There are several factors you need to consider before sending out bulk mail, and we’ve listed everything you need to know below.

What can I send by bulk mail?

There are lots of options when it comes to what items you can send through our handy

bulk postage system to aid your marketing campaign.

Letters- You could send a standard enveloped letter to inform your customers of recent or upcoming changes to your business to keep them up to date with your company.

Postcards- Postcards are an efficient way to quickly grab the attention of a reader, making them an advantageous marketing technique for any business.

Catalogues- You can use a catalogue to showcase your full range of products to your customers all in one handy piece of bulk mail.

Brochure- Brochures are just like catalogues but smaller! These are ideal for small business advertising like restaurant menus, Salon treatment lists etc.

Leaflets- Leaflets have a lot of similarities to brochures, however in general leaflets are more informative and can be used for example, by a political party to deliver their manifesto and their messages.

Prospectuses- The most common use of prospectuses is by universities to deliver their course lists but are also bulk mailed out by smaller training providers like adult education services.

Can size and volume limit my Bulk Mail?

Yes, there are limits and restrictions in place for the size and volume of the bulk mail you send to ensure the best discounts. The Royal Mail requires that:

Small Letters must be 240mm in length, 165mm wide and 5mm in-depth and you must send over 20,000 pieces to qualify for a bulk postage discount.

Large Letters are defined as 353mm in length, 250mm wide and 25mm in-depth, and you must send over 10,000 pieces to qualify for a bulk postage discount.

How to get the most out of your cost savings with Bulk Mail

• Pre-sort your mail, by allowing us to pre-sort your data; we can take advantage of sorted mail discounts, allowing for a much more efficient and smooth delivery time.
• Check your Data, make sure that all the recipient’s information is accurate and correct. We understand how much you can save by cleansing your data and maximising ROI by filtering out poor data.
• Use Pre-paid methods for stamping; it is much more cost-effective to send your bulk mail with us if you are currently franking your mail, 95% of our customers who contact us about bulk postage find that it is more cost-effective for us to complete the fulfilment (printing, enclosing and postage) than they currently pay for franking.
• Try to send small light items, by sending smaller items of bulk mail with little weight to them you can guarantee a larger discount on your bulk postage campaign.

Mailing Houses- The Most Successful Option

The best option for any business when it comes to getting the most out of bulk postage services is to use a reputable mailing house like The Direct Mail Company. We can handle the majority of factors mentioned in this article in an efficient way that guarantees results, massively reducing your own labour costs and cutting the time it takes to launch your campaign. Choosing us will offer you further discounts as we work with leading postage providers to get you the best bulk postage rates in the UK.

If you’re interested in how the Direct Mail Company can help your business launch your next bulk postage campaign, contact us today or call 0800 2533 843 sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk

If you are a local authority wanting more information on direct mailing services, national direct mail specialists, the Direct Mail Company, are here to help!

What is Direct Mail?

Direct mail is simply any marketing mail that is sent to an existing customer or a potential customer. It’s a very handy method used by many businesses and marketers to reach out to new audiences, as well as to expand their brand and their company. Direct Mail is proven to have a high ROI, making it an essential element to the success of countless campaigns.

Despite this, direct mail doesn’t have to be used for monetary purposes. Local authorities, as well as many other agencies and businesses, use direct mail services to inform citizens, deliver warnings and request action on certain issues.

How can the Direct Mail Company’s services assist you with your direct mailing?

There are four key ways in which we can help local authorities with their direct mail:

1- Prepare- We can help you design, plan and prepare your campaign. Some local authorities already know exactly how they want the campaign’s design to look. However, others want our expert advice and ask for our recommendations. We’ve helped several local authorities with their direct mailing campaigns in the past and use this experience within each new campaign.

2- Personalise- Personalising is technically part of the preparation; however, it is so important in the success of a direct mailing campaign that it earns its own section. Personalising direct mail is so effective, and a massive 98% of customers believe that the use of personalisation is a very important element of direct mail. The use of different colours and varied text are simple ways to impact an audience; we use methods like variable data printing to make sure that the greatest impression is made on your client.

3- Print and Pack-  We can bulk print your order and then package it however you like- providing stress-free direct mail. By bulk printing, we can deliver a far more cost-effective solution for your local authority as well as saving you lots of time by packaging your order too!

4- Fulfilment- In our fully internal mailing house, we work with leading postage providers in the UK and internationally so that we can make use of the most competitive rates and the fastest delivery times. We take the hassle out of direct mail, with clear pricing and dedicated account managers, we can guarantee that your residents and citizens get their mail delivered on time, every time.

Here at the Direct Mail Company, we aim to provide a stress-free direct mail, allowing us to take control of your direct mail so that you can have full confidence in a seamless service, with your mail printed, enclosed and delivered on time.

If you are a local authority looking for expert direct mailing services, the Direct Mail Company can help you.

Don’t hesitate to contact us today -sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk

With technology advancing at such a fast pace, it’s easy to think anything, and everything digital is the only way forward, leaving no room for old school marketing methods like direct mail. However, you have to consider what would your customers actually prefer to receive?

Nowadays, it’s common for businesses to assume that their audience would want to receive marketing emails from them. Despite this, a recent survey by royal mail found that this may not actually be the case.

What did a Survey by Royal Mail Find?

A survey carried out by Royal Mail in 2013, presented that 63% of people said if a marketing message is delivered via direct mail, they are more likely to take it seriously, in comparison to the 18% that favoured receiving email.

An important part of email marketing is making the customer feel more valued and more connected to the company. Responders to the survey said they valued something more if they could see and touch it, rather than only being able to see it. Following this, 57% of people surveyed said that direct mail makes them feel more valued, whilst only 17% felt valued through email use. Direct mail has an undeniable impact on a customer.

When marketing your brand, it is key to think about how your company appears to the customer. The way your direct mail comes across will help them gage a better opinion on you, which will affect how likely they are to want to continue to build a relationship with your business. The survey also asked which method gave a better impression of the company, which again favoured direct mail with 55% compared to 25% who said email.

In a more recent survey carried out by Royal Mail, it was found that as a result of receiving direct mail, 92% of people were driven to engage in online activity, a further 87% were influenced to make online purchases and 54% of people engaged on social media.

However, despite direct mail standing out as being more effective than email, 51% of people surveyed said that they prefer receiving both direct mail and email, 13% more people visited the advertised online site, 21% made a bigger purchase and 35% more responded to coupons or vouchers.

Why is Direct mail so effective?

It’s Targeted- You choose who you want to mail to be sent to and when it will be sent.

It’s Accountable- Direct Mail gives you the ability to track the success of your campaign.

It’s Integrated- Direct mail can easily be integrated with the web, emails and social media to create a winning campaign.

It’s Tangible- Direct mail comes in all shapes and sizes; the possibilities are endless when creating mail to target your customer and make a lasting impression specifically.

It’s Personal- With Direct Mail you can add that personal touch and address your customers by name. The personal touch within receiving physical direct mail makes a huge impact, compared to the synthetic and methodical appearance of an email. Direct Mail uses the most up-to-date technology in data and print to help you create a unique, customised piece that will target your customers directly in an effective way.

As you can see, direct mail is still very much relevant to today’s marketing. Digital technology may be taking over, but Direct mail still has a key part to play with its ability to create emotional and physical responses that digital techniques cannot.

For more information on our direct mail services or bulk postage rates by the Direct Mail Company, please feel free to get in contact todaysales@thedirectmailcompany.co.uk or follow us on Facebook.

Transactional mail can be highly personalised across several channels, as well as being used to reduce organisational costs and aid business continuity. But where is the proof and the statistics to show all of this?

Sending your transactional mail via Direct Mail vs Email

This is an important comparison to make as some transactional email will be expected and are very likely to be read, like a receipt from a recent online order, however other forms of transactional mail are more urgent and crucial. 98% of people sort through their transactional mail daily, whereas it average that 20% of people don’t even open their emails- meaning people are more likely to take immediate action on an invoice or debt repayment etc. if it is sent by direct mail rather than email.

Quick Stats on Mail vs Email-

• 60% of people feel that direct mail keeps the brand in their mind
• People have a much higher attachment to mail because it stays in their memory a lot longer
• 63% of people believe a direct mail campaign is more serious than an email campaign (only 17% believe an email campaign is)
• 39% of all households have a designated area to store and display mail

Sending Transactional Mail

Generally, there has been a decline in the amount of transactional mail that has been sent. This is due to most mail now being much easier to send by email, like order confirmations and parcel tracking details, which a customer does not need to receive via physical mail.

However transactional mail has at least 95% of all its recipients reading through any invoices, statements etc. that they receive. With email’s being so easily attainable nowadays, it’s easy for your inbox to become overloaded with emails every day, making a piece of physical transactional mail much more appealing and likely to evoke a response.

Quick Stats on Transactional Mail

• Only 4% of people discard transactional mail without reading it
• People spend an average of 2-3 minutes reading transactional mail compared to only 15-20 seconds reading a transactional email
• By personalising transactional mail, it results in around a 14% higher rate of traffic generation than without personalisation, and 7% higher chance of a direct order.

Do you need our help making use of the many varied applications for transactional direct mail?

Whether you need help managing your data or a mailing house to take care of the physical printing and mailing of the transactional mail itself, we are here to help you.

You can contact us today, The Direct Mail Company, for more information on our direct mail and bulk postage – sales@thedirectmailcompany.co.ukor call us on 0808 2533 836.

Believe it or not, expanding a business and increasing profits is not the be-all and end-all of the uses for direct mail and direct marketing campaigns.

Direct mail can also be used to do a lot of good with charities, as it is a very effective fundraising method.

Charity Direct Mail Provides ROI

In principle, a charity is still a business. Charities have to establish a brand, source their data, market themselves as well as gain new donors, like normal businesses. However, they do not aim to make a profit from it.

Due to this, charities can approach their marketing strategies in the same way as any other business, meaning they capitalise on the use of emails, social media, billboards etc., just advertising a different message to that of normal business.

We also have figures to support the success of charities using direct mail. For instance, 70% of people said that they find direct mail more personal than the use of emails or the internet. Also, only 25% of people said that they would open emails from a non-profit organisation. To stress the importance of direct mail for charities further, Charities spend 61% of their advertising spend on direct mail, that’s £239m of £394m, because of this, a huge 79% of all charity donations come from direct mail.

Charity Direct Mail Fundraising

The ROI of fundraising via print is staggering: for every £1 spent, £4 in donations are received, below is two examples of big charities and how direct mail has influenced their fundraising.

The Alzheimer’s Society- In the Christmas of 2007, the Alzheimer’s Society launched a direct mail campaign, aiming to gain a 10% response rate and raise £99,750. By creating an emotive direct mail campaign, using a pack that an email could not provide, the charity achieved above and beyond what they could have expected.

While they only beat their target response rate by 1%, the average donation was nearly three times higher than the target average, bringing in a fundraising total of £165,164. A massive contributor to this was the use of varied direct mail, put together by the charity to tug on each recipient’s heartstrings.

American Cancer Society (ACS) – In 2013, the American Cancer Society decided to halt all the use of direct mail for fundraising causing a drastic effect. The charity lost the gaining of new donors by 11% in a single year, as well as the donations from new donors dropping by a massive £7m. The ACS’s own income dropped by £29m in a year from £572m to £543m, which is enough proof to any charity that direct mail works and choosing to overlook it can have huge consequences.

Sending Trustworthy and Charitable Direct Mail Through the Direct Mail Company

When launching any direct mail campaign that asks for donations, it obviously has to be structured responsibly and professionally.

Here at the Direct Mail Company, we are specialists in Charity Direct Mail and have lots of experience with running effective fundraising campaigns for charities.

If you’re looking for a dependable mailing house to develop your charity direct mail campaign, contact us today – sales@thedirectcompany.co.uk