The Holy Grail Of Direct Marketing

Everyone is looking for the Holy Grail of  a successful direct marketing email, those emails that not only make it through the delete button and spam filter but translate into direct action. It’s hard to get it right, but when you do, you’ll know about it. We take a look at how your direct marketing strategy can be improved.To maximize your marketing ROI, incorporating eye-catching direct mail postcards into your strategy can help you capture attention and drive higher response rates.

Audience

How well do you know yours? Not just through guess work, or even from some first hand interaction but solid, deep drilling research that creates a customer avatar. Whether you sell your web development services or agricultural seed, getting to know your audience is the key step to making the whole process work.

Relevance

You don’t have time to waste reading lengthy emails that take their time getting to the point, and neither do your customers. Get to the point quickly and make your offer something that your customer will want to act upon. Your call to action must be relevant and timely, so avoid an email and offer that is abstract and vague.

Style

If you don’t know how to write in a way that inspiries your customers, don’t do it. Short, punchy and engaging is what you’re looking for. On top of that you need to completely avoid any missteps when it comes to syntax, spelling and grammar, so have anything you send out, double and triple-checked for errors.

Reason

Ask yourself what is it, precisely, you want your reader to do. Make it clear and easy for the reader to follow and give them a reason to sign up to your newsletter, visit your website and so on.

Subject line

This is the first and only way to grab your customer’s attention so make it count. The first six words are key to getting the reader to open the rest of the email so make it punchy, relevant and tantalizing. Whether you offer a bit of salacious gossip, a give away or a discount, make it count.

Avoid writing anything over 12 words, or anything that sounds boring and irrelevant to your carefully-targeted customer base.

Test

Not all emails look the same across all servers so make sure yours works well whether received via Microsoft, Explorer and so on. The only way to do this is to send test emails so spend some time doing this and getting the feedback you need to make any adjustments to your mail out.

Now is also a great time to get some feedback from a test group. So gather outside participants to talk to you about how they feel and would act if they received your mailout. Also send to colleagues for some proofreading and editing comments.

You’ll also want to ask testees to carefully check all the embedded links to make sure they work and take you to the correct page. Once sent out, it’s too late to send out corrections so everything has to work perfectly first time. Your first impression is everything so mistakes and non-working links are a big no-no.

Time

Did you know that last thing on a Friday and first thing on a Monday are the last times you should think about sending an unsolicited email? It’s well worth spending some time researching when is the best time but very often later in the week, say a Wednesday or Thursday morning, appear to work best. The backlog of emails have been cleared and the initial deadlines have been met and the working week is ticking along as normal.

You may find that your timing comes down to a little bit of trial and error, which brings us to the last point: