The direct mailing business can be a lucrative business to run, given its relative inexpensiveness and the willingness of clients to pay for advertising. As with any business, there are certain things to consider to maximize your effectiveness, including knowing your market, using time-cutting machines like envelope printers or postage scales to your advantage, and expanding to other forms of direct marketing.
Know Your Market
In any business, knowing the makeup of your market is one of the most important factors to figure out; the case is the same when it comes to your direct mail business. With direct mail, not only does it affect the clients you take on and how you work to get their product out to prospective buyers, but it can also help you decide what product mail gets sent to which buyer. Direct mail businesses use databases to determine whether a recipient is the right person for a certain product.
The Benefits of Direct Mail
For your clients, using direct mail can be a very beneficial form of advertising. For one thing, direct mail is relatively inexpensive, especially given the size of the audience that it can reach. But one of the main benefits for this sort of advertising is the ability to determine how effective the advertising campaign is. Both the amount of mailers sent out and the amount of mailers that have been used are quantifiable, allowing the response rate of the campaign to be easily determined. For example, if 100 ads have been sent out and 10 of them are used, the response rate would be 10%. The response rate for direct mailers is more quantifiable than other forms of advertising whose response rate is determined differently.
Working Efficiently
Running an efficient business means that both your time and your money is being used wisely. Making sure that there aren't any useless expenses can help assure that you aren't wasting your money on things you may not need and spending too much time on tedious processes. In the direct mail business, that can mean anything from streamlining your envelope stuffing process to reducing the need to wait in lines at the post office. Using an envelope printer, one that can handle the task of printing on hundreds of envelopes at a time can save so much time when you're trying to get as many envelopes out as possible. Likewise, having a postage scale at your home that prints postage can save you countless man hours that do not need to be spent waiting on line.
Expansion to Other Direct Marketing
If you're running a business that is strictly direct mail, you are really only cornering the market on a tip of the iceberg. Direct marketing has expanded along with the expansion of online marketing. Display ads and paid search engine results are a few ways that direct marketing has increased past simple e-mail advertisements in the last decade. Outside of the digital space, direct marketing can also be accomplished by voice mail advertisements, telemarketing, and direct response television ads.
Direct mail has shown to be an effective way to advertise. But as the world trend of going paperless has made postal services less important, expanding to a paperless business model would be an important step to staying in business.
