Direct mail marketing is something that many businesses today still rely on as a key part of their advertising campaign. However, there is an increasing drive towards digital marketing. You might be wondering whether it’s worth pursuing mailshots or whether you should focus all of your budget on digital. Or, perhaps you want to combine direct mail with your digital strategy?
Despite the changes in the marketing sector that we’ve seen over recent years, direct mail certainly isn’t extinct. Many businesses find that mailshots are still a great way to attract new customers and to retain existing ones. So, is it the right choice for your organisation? Here, we take a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of direct mail marketing so you can make a well-informed decision.
The Pros of Direct Mail:
Targeting Your Niche Audience
When you target your marketing campaign, you’ll have more success, and when you opt for direct mail marketing, you’re able to send information about your brand to the group of people who are most likely to be interested in making a purchase.
Providing Detailed Information
When you send out a direct mailshot, you have plenty of space to sell your brand, your products and your services. This allows you to include a lot of detail and information. Event invites, flyers and letters give you the opportunity to outline your company’s benefits and any deals that you may be offering in great depth. This increases the chance of making a sale.
Response Rates Can Be High
In an age where we are exposed to constant digital adverts through email and social media, the impact of tangible media like direct mail is rising. Despite most companies shifting marketing spend towards digital over the past decade, there is a growing number of companies who are now recognising the importance of real-life, tangible forms of marketing. After all, the Direct Marketing Assocation found that direct mail can illicit a response anywhere from 10 to 30 times higher than digital.
More Memorable Than Digital Media
Let us use an example here.
A clothing company wants to advertise their newest summer collection to you.
They send an email to 100 people, and they send a direct mail piece to another 100 people. They both have the same marketing messaging and the same content.
Which will be more memorable? The email that was only seen through a screen? Or the tangible direct mail piece that the customer held in their own hands?
The Cons of Direct Mail:
It Can Take a Long Time to Get Right
Often business try to handle their print and mailing in-house due to financial reasons. Whilst this may make sense initially where volumes are low and the printing required is infrequent. However, once a business inevitably grows its printing and mailing operation, the time taken to fulfil this extra work means that it no longer makes sense to keep print and mail fulfilment in-house.
Outsourcing direct mail marketing to a mailing house tends to free up time. They are experienced in optimising the whole process, from conceptualisation right through to postage, they tend to have experience in minimising the time-intensive aspect of direct mail.
The Costs May Add Up
When you send out direct mailshots, the costs can mount up quite rapidly. It isn’t only about creating the mailshot itself, it’s also about printing it, packaging it and sending it out to the target audience. All of this is time-consuming for you or your staff, and it can also be expensive.
Planning and designing your direct mail can be a long process in the first place before you start to think about the added time involved in printing the mailshots out, putting them in envelopes, addressing those envelopes and then mailing them. This can cost you dearly in terms of productivity. If you’re doing the job yourself, you won’t have enough time to focus on the key aspects of your business which can then end up reducing your profits.
If you’re using your staff to get the job done, you may end up having to pay them extra for overtime, or even have to pay out to hire temporary employees to carry out the task if you have a large campaign to tackle. Reducing costs is always important for any business, so it’s easy to see why some company owners decide to give direct mail marketing a miss.
Addressing The Problems
Although direct mail marketing can be expensive and time-consuming to deal with, there are solutions to make the process quicker and cheaper. Using direct mail services is a great way to reduce the cost of mailshot marketing and, since you’ll be outsourcing to a team of experts in the mailing industry, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time and effort too. You can therefore reap all of the benefits of direct mail marketing at an affordable price thanks to the discounts you can receive from using a mailing house.
If you’re ready to find out more about how direct mail services can help you to enjoy the advantages of direct mail marketing without having to waste time and money on the process, contact our team today. We look forward to helping you reach a wider audience and grow your business.