6 Ways Your Direct Mail Campaign Can Flop and How to Avoid Them.

by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated December 30, 2015

Direct mail marketing can sometimes be a tricky business. If you overlook something seemingly small it could have a large impact on whether or not your campaign works. Here are six direct mail errors you’ll want to avoid.

#1 Wrong or Absent Contact Information

Contact information can be an easy thing to gloss over. When you’re so concentrated on getting your logo just the right size and making sure your message is clear and easy to read, you can forget about the little things like a phone number or website.

Having the wrong contact information can also be an issue. “Wrong” contact information can mean two things: The wrong phone number, wrong email, etc., or the wrong type of contact information. If your target audience is 70+ and the only two pieces of contact information you give out are a website and an email, don’t expect a whole lot of ROI on that campaign. My grandma, for one, has never used a computer, same goes for my grandaddy. Similarly, if your target market are tweens and teens and the only pieces of contact information you give out are a phone number and physical address, again you’re not going to get a great ROI.

Know how your audience likes to contact others and don’t forget to add the correct contact information.

#2 Not Doing Audience Research

This ties in to #1; you have to know your audience before you can accurately gauge how well they will or will not take your direct mail campaign. Audience research can be anything from how a particular demographic refers to an object to what kinds of things certain demographics are interested in.

In the Northern regions (at least along the East Coast) soft drinks are referred to as “pop” while further South (again, at least along the East Coast) they’re referred to as “soda.” If you sent a direct mail campaign out about a new soft drink referring to it as “soda,” that would most likely be better received in the South East than the North East.

Don’t be sloppy with your audience research.

#3 Sending the Wrong Mailers to the Wrong Audience

Say you’ve done extensive audience research and you know that your soft drink campaign referring to the drink as “pop” is going to Pennsylvania and your campaign referring to it as “soda” is going to Virginia. Everything’s just right. But some how your campaigns get swapped in transit and your “pop” campaign when to Virginia and your “soda” campaign went to Pennsylvania. All that hard work down the drain!

Make sure you correctly print the address information on your mailers. If you accidentally print Group A’s information on Group B’s mailers, well then Group B’s mailers are going to go to Group A. Having all of your boxes labeled with an instruction sheet inside each can help with that.

Stay organized!

#4 Mailer Design is Too Busy

Unfortunately this is one of the biggest ways your campaign can flop. If you have 7 different messages with 8 different fonts all in bold red, yellow, and neon green, very few people are going to read it.

Focus your mailer around one message, not because your audience can’t handle more than one message, but because they’re too busy multitasking to try to decipher what you want them to do. Want them to call you for a quote? Tell them! Don’t gently suggest it. Make sure your mailer is sharp, crisp, and to the point.

Keep it clean. Keep it simple.

#5 Wrong Timing

Number five ties in with number two. If you mess up the timing you can mess up the whole campaign. There’s no sense in doing a direct mail campaign for ice cream in the dead of winter. This is a bit of an extreme example, but you get my point.

Don’t send a remodeling direct mail campaign to a neighborhood with houses that were just built this year. Use not only the time of the year, but the weather in your favor. A huge snow storm expected to hit in a couple of weeks? Get your snow removal ads out there! Sometimes as marketers we just want to be heard and we forget that we have to pause to listen to what’s going on around us.

You can’t sell ice to an Eskimo in Alaska, but when he’s in Florida he’ll be your biggest customer.

#6 No Call To Action

Last but most definitely not least! A Call To Action (CTA) is a phrase that tells the prospect what to do next. It can be as simple as “Call Now” to “Call us to recieve a Free quote on apple sauce!” The more descriptive your CTA the better…to an extent. You want to tell your prospect what to do and what they’ll get for doing what you ask, but you don’t want to go into every tiny detail.

“Call us to recieve a Free quote on apple sauce” is a good length. It tells you what to do and what you’ll get if you do what is asked. “Call us to recieve a Free quote on apple sauce that we’ll ship to you as soon as we can after we freshly make the apple sauce at home in our secret cabin with our cat Jojo” is not a good CTA. It goes in to far too much detail and by the time your prospect get to the part about the can Jojo they’ve forgotten about what they were supposed to do in the first place.

On the flip side, if you don’t have a CTA then how is the prospect going to know what to do? Say your sales team is ready to field calls from your campaign but on your mailer you list your phone number, website, email address, and physical address but no CTA telling your prospects to call you. You’ll get some calls, some visits to your website, emails, some letters, and maybe even a few people showing up at your door step. Or you may get just the opposite; nothing. People may be interested in your offer but they don’t know what to do next so they move on to the next mailer who may be your competitor with a clean CTA and go with them.