Only a few years ago we were all getting a lot of junk mail through the post, and our gatekeepers were putting them into the bin before they reached the decision maker. It was around that time when e-mail marketing became more popular with marketers, and we certainly enjoyed lots of great results with that type of media.
Three or four years on, direct mail has mostly disappeared from the landscape, whilst e-mail marketing is being tried by almost every business. A few years ago we thought that e-mail marketing executed creatively was nice to see, but now most business people hit the delete button before even looking what the subject is about.
Fashions come and go, and certainly clothing comes in and out of fashion through the decades. It is similar with marketing activities, with social media and SEO being the latest trends, and e-mail marketing taking a dive in the opposite direction. The latest trend to come back into fashion is actually direct mail. Because you don’t see much of it now, it’s actually become a novelty piece again, with smart marketers using it the best effect.
One area where you probably would see very few results is with something like an A5 mailer. If you were to personalise it on a digital print press it would help increase responses. The types of direct mail that is very effective at the moment pieces that are very creative and trigger an instant impact with your target market.
Here is an example campaign that our marketing company has just finished for our own marketing purposes. We wrote a piece of editorial and then designed it onto a piece of newspaper. It was printed in black on both sides, and we had rough gradients and tinted images behind the text to make it look like newspaper print. During the finishing process the pieces were written by hand to create a torn out effect, as though someone had torn it out of the newspaper. To finish the piece we placed a post-it note on every single campaign and hand wrote “I saw this and thought of you!”
We sent this to our main prospects, and the enquiry rate was high, landing several clients within the month that the piece was sent out.
The second campaign involved the user creating an origami bird from a blank piece of paper. You can see from the picture below that the direct mail piece was sent as a card, which included a QR code. The QR code sent people to an area of our website where we had created an instructional video on how to create the origami bird. Within the mini brochure we wrote about what origami represents, and what’s outsourced marketing represents. The overall message was that you can create fantastic results from simple beginnings.
The whole campaign was branded carefully in our colours, and again we had several leads from this campaign. In a way, people didn’t even have to make the bird up, they were just impressed by how creative the campaign was and the feedback with the leads was basically along the lines of “you need to come and speak to us about marketing”.
So, the message is that direct mail is back! But make sure it’s creative.