As we’ll see, in direct mail the list is the most important aspect of your marketing effort. If you can’t reach your market (e.g., if you can’t find a list or enough lists), you can’t sell your product.
Despite the cautions in the following sections, and even though you may not be able to sell every product or service through a direct mail effort, what you can often do is generate qualified leads. Having qualified leads can then become part of your sales pipeline, providing salespeople with names of individuals or companies that have expressed some interest or affinity that suggests they might be a good candidate for a follow-up call or visit.
1.2 Does your product have broad appeal?
Clothing has broad appeal. Everybody wears clothes. Many people buy clothes for fun, or to be fashionable, and these people buy clothes again and again because their old wardrobes become dated, or because they want to have more fun or be more fashionable! Even those who wear clothing strictly for utilitarian purposes need new clothes when theirs wear out. Clothing is also a common gift item.
Again, it gets down to the potential size of your market. The bigger the potential market, the greater the potential for higher volumes of sales. Direct mail is, more than anything, a numbers game.
1.3 Does your product stand out from the crowd?
Direct mail is easy to do, particularly in the digital age. That means that if you have competitors — and just about everybody has competitors — and direct mail is a viable marketing communication option for your product or service, your competitors are likely to be using direct mail as well. So you will need to stand out in some manner from your competition in terms of product quality, price point, access, or service (or some combination of these).
1.4 Can you describe or illustrate your product effectively through direct mail?
Clothing can be sold readily via direct mail because it’s relatively easy to describe or illustrate through photographs. However, selling houses through the mail is more challenging. Why? Because houses are more complex and require more personal involvement on the part of the buyer to make a decision. In fact, the need for involvement tends to increase along with the dollar value of the item being considered for purchase. The higher the cost, the more the consumer will want to have an opportunity to see, examine, experience, and ask questions about the product. That’s more than you can hope to do through a single direct mail effort.
1.5 Can you make a profit?
In the past, if your product sold for less than $15 and you only had one product to sell, you probably wouldn’t be able to justify the cost of a direct mail campaign, which would include the cost of developing, printing, and mailing your direct mail piece as well as the cost of renting a list. Those days are gone, though, thanks to the advent of digital direct mail. In fact, one of the big benefits of email marketing is the low cost, since the cost of print and postage have literally been eliminated.
2. Goals
Determining whether your direct mail effort will be designed to generate sales, leads, or something else is part of the goal-setting process.
Goals are high-level statements of some end result you hope to achieve. Your direct mail goals might be to —
• generate qualified leads,
• increase sales, or
• increase your prospect/mailing list.
Your goal statement simply indicates what it is you hope to achieve with your direct mail effort. You can be more specific in your goal statement by including an indication of the target audience you’re selecting. For example, your statements might include:
• Generate qualified leads in a certain geographic area or among a certain demographic segment.
• Increase sales to new customers, to customers who haven’t purchased over a certain period of time, or to a new category of customers.
• Increase the number of CEOs or purchasing managers who sign up for your mailing list.
Table 1 includes some actual goal statements from direct mail campaigns.
Table 1: Goal Statements from Direct Mail Campaigns
| Type of Business or Service | Goal |
| Dental clinic | Increase new patients. |
| Insurance company | Increase revenue and new clients. |
| Physical therapy services | Raise awareness of practice and increase new patients. |
| Jewelry | Increase attendance and sales at jewelry shows. |
| Party rental | Gain recognition for the business and attract more walk-in clients and web visitors. |
| Men’s clothing | Increase sales. |
Hopefully, what you’ll notice from all of these examples is that while they are specific and provide an indication of what the marketer hopes to achieve through the direct mail effort, they are not measurable. By how much does the marketer wish to increase new patients, and what type of new patients does he or she want? By what date? That’s okay. These are goals. Specificity is good, but one thing that goals do not do is indicate a specific numeric target or quantifiable end point. That’s what objectives are for.
3. Objectives
Objectives are the quantifiable element of your direct mail campaign. What, specifically, is it that you hope to achieve? The great benefit of direct mail being measurable has already been mentioned, but you don’t just measure your efforts after the campaign is over. You need to think about what it is you want to measure before the campaign begins. In short, what will success look like for you? How will you know if your campaign has been an effective one? The only way you can answer these questions is to establish specific objectives.
The key difference between goals and objectives is that goals provide a general direction but not enough specificity so that after the campaign is over, two independent people could say “Yes, we did it,” or “No, we didn’t.”
Consider the dental clinic’s goal in Table 1 of increasing new patients. Suppose the first day after the direct mail campaign goes out a new patient calls for an appointment. Does that mean the effort was a success? The goal has been met, after all. But no, of course it doesn’t. Objectives are designed to create specificity around goals. Good objectives are stated in such a way that after the campaign is over, two or more individuals looking at the results can say “Yes, we were a success” or “No, we didn’t achieve our objectives.” A great acronym that can help marketers develop effective objectives is SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time bound.
3.1 Objectives must be specific
We’ve already seen that “increase sales” is not specific enough to qualify as a good objective. A specific objective includes distinct details. Here’s an example we can all relate to: losing weight. “Lose weight” is not specific, but “lose 15 pounds” is. Here