How to Improve Your Direct Mail Campaign

Key Takeaways

Using measurable results from your previous direct mail campaigns can help you determine what you should change can help you improve your direct mail campaign.
Look at your mailing list, audience, offer, creative, timing, and other elements of your campaign rather than focusing on just your response rate.
When testing ways to improve your campaign’s performance, try to limit the number of variables that you’re changing so you can have a better idea of what affected the results.

Introduction

After your direct mail campaign has concluded, it might feel disheartening if your campaign didn’t meet your expectations. While you might be tempted to change everything about your next campaign, take a step back and think about what the best method is to improve your campaign. If you’re looking to improve your direct mail campaign and approach the process of improvement methodically, you can make changes that help you understand what works, and what doesn’t.

Start with Your Previous Campaign’s Results

Before doing anything else, look at the results from your campaign, and see what actually happened, and analyze some of your metrics, including your:

If you see a metric that doesn’t meet your standard, that could be a way to improve your direct mail campaign. However, don’t judge your entire campaign based on one metric alone.

As an example of why they shouldn’t be evaluated alone, let’s say we have two campaigns. Campaign A has a lower response rate than Campaign B, but Campaign A’s respondents are more likely to become customers. Based on that, which campaign is going to be more successful? It’s hard to say based on that information by itself, which is why you if you’re looking to improve your direct mail campaign, you should analyze your metrics together, rather than homing in on only the metrics that failed to meet your expectations.

Determine What Might Have Impacted Your Results

If you’re looking to improve your direct mail campaign, there are several variables that can make your results stray from what you wanted them to be. When looking to improve your direct mail campaign, analyze these campaign variables and make sure that nothing has strayed from what you originally anticipated with your campaign.

Offer

Were the recipients of your mail piece compelled to respond?

Creative/Mail Piece

Was the message in your mail piece understandable, and was your call to action obvious? Does your mail piece stand out enough to catch its recipient’s attention, or did it blend in with the rest of the mail in their mailbox?

Timing

Did your mail piece reach the recipient at the correct time, or was your mail piece too early/late? Or have you mailed the recipient too much in a period of time?

Call to Action/Response Method

How easy was the process for your customer to take the next step in responding to your mail piece?

Landing Page/Sales Process

Your mail piece might’ve done its job, but the landing page when responding to your offer or the process of purchasing or subscribing to your product or service might’ve been too difficult. Was it simple for them to respond, or did they lose interest in your offer while trying to navigate your chosen response method?

Review Your Mailing List and Audience

Your chosen mailing list can be one of the biggest variables of how your direct mail campaign performs. There are tens of thousands of mailing lists that are on the market, and choosing the correct one can be a difficult task. There are also different types of lists, such as compiled vs. response, and consumer vs. business.

If you’re looking to improve your direct mail campaign, ask yourself these questions about the mailing list you just used for your campaign:

Did a certain audience segment respond better than others?
Did a particular geographic area perform differently than other areas?
Were you targeting your audience too broadly? Or too specifically?
Are there any additional characteristics that could help you define your audience?

If nothing about those questions stands out, then it could be worth testing out a different mailing list. In short, you would keep as much as you can (audience, mail piece, etc.) the same while testing the different mailing lists and conducting a test using a large enough sample to produce a meaningful result. Learn more about these tests in mailing list testing explained, and A/B tests, as well as knowing when to rent a different mailing list.

Don’t Change Everything Between Campaigns

At the same time, changing everything about your campaign would make it too difficult to determine what caused the result to change positively or negatively. If you change your mailing list, offer, creative, call to action, and timing at the same time and your campaign performs better or worse, you won’t know which change was responsible.

Keep What Worked

One of the ways to improve your direct mail campaign is to not change something if it’s working well for your campaign. If you’ve done multiple campaigns where only a small number of things have been changed and have strong evidence that something is working, consider keeping that as a control for your campaign, and keep revising the weak points in your campaign. Using these test results can help you improve your future direct mail campaigns.

Build a Better Offer

You might have a good mail piece, mailing list, and target audience, but a poor offer could hold your otherwise promising campaign back. Review your offer and ask yourself:

Is my offer easy to understand?
Is the value of my offer clear to the recipient?
Does my offer fit the audience that I mailed to?
Does my offer give the recipient a compelling reason to respond?

Design a Control Campaign

Once you have a direct mail campaign that has performed reasonably well, you can use it as a control. A control campaign allows you to use an established version with documented results to compare against when testing a new mailing list, offer, creative, etc.

Control: Existing mail piece + Offer A

Test: Existing mail piece + Offer B

Document What You’ve Tested

When looking to improve your direct mail campaign, it might seem obvious to keep a record of what you’ve tested. However, it’s easy to forget something that you tested even just a few campaigns back. Keep a history of your mailing campaigns and their:

Mailing list
Offer
Creative
Mailing date
Total campaign cost
What the campaigns results were
Quantity mailed
Audience/segment tested

Doing this will prevent you from accidentally testing something that you’ve already tested, which could waste money, time, and effort.

Think Beyond Just One Campaign

Conducting just one more campaign most likely won’t produce the perfect mail piece. Instead, try to picture where you would like your direct mail program to be several campaigns from now. If you don’t have anything to compare your test results to, then it’s hard to tell where you are with your campaign’s progress, which can make it hard to improve your direct mail campaign.

Think Outside of Just Changing Your Mail Piece

While your mail piece is the part of the campaign that your target customers will obviously see, look beyond your mail piece and mailing list to ensure that you’re being as smart as you can with other aspects of your campaign. An example of how to improve your direct mail campaign without touching the mail piece or mailing list is to make sure that you’re getting the cheapest mailing prices possible, and that you’ve looked at the USPS website to see if they have any specials, promotions, or deals that are currently active to potentially save even more money.

Remember, trying to improve your direct mail campaign doesn’t always have to just mean trying to generate more responses. You can improve your direct mail campaign in other ways, such as reducing postage or production expenses, improving your response process, or making the campaign easier to measure can also be areas of improvement to investigate.

FAQ

Q: What should I change if my direct mail campaign didn’t perform as well as I thought it would?
- A: If your campaign performs poorly, then review your mailing list, target customer/audience, offer, creative, call to action, timing, and post-response process when trying to identify an area that is worth changing. Don’t just assume that one particular element of your campaign is the reason why you have a bad performance, multiple parts of your campaign could be causing that.
Q: Should I change every aspect of my campaign for my next mailing?
- A: No. If you’re looking to improve your direct mail campaign and you have elements of your campaign that are performing well, don’t get rid of them if you can salvage them when you plan your next campaign. If you change several different things about your next direct mail campaign and see a major change in performance, either positively or negatively, it could become difficult to determine which change that you made was responsible.
Q: How do I know if my mailing list contributed to my campaign’s poor performance?
- A: Comparing your results between mailing lists or audience segments can help to provide you with some evidence about which mailing list audience performs better with your offer and mail piece. Testing multiple mailing lists can help to better answer your question.
Q: How many campaigns do I need to conduct to know if my offer is working?
- A: There isn’t a magic number of campaigns that need to be conducted to know if your offer is working. While one campaign could provide data that would say one way or the other, running additional tests could provide more evidence about how the offer performs, and can give you greater confidence in your conclusions.

Conclusion

The process to improve your direct mail campaign begins with understanding what happened in your previous one. By reviewing your results and making strategic, informed changes to your mailing list, offer, creative, timing, and various other elements of your campaign, you can learn something from each mailing that you conduct that can help to guide the next one. If you follow this pattern of continuous improvement, you can help build long-term direct mail success.

If you have any questions regarding finding your customer or mailing list, or how to improve your direct mail campaign going forward, contact Geon today, and we would be happy to help where we can.

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