All posts tagged direct marketing

Many micro business owners have found success in creating a direct mail marketing campaign to help build brand awareness and obtain new customers. Whether you are promoting a new feature of your business, notifying folks of a sale or simply letting your target audience know you are open for business; direct mail marketing can be a great tool for getting your message out. Simply put, receiving mail at home puts the advertiser’s message in the hands of the consumer at a time the receiver is more likely to read it as they review the rest of the mail.

While some may say the process can be a confusing, especially obtaining a targeted mailing list, it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few tips to help guide you through the process:

Research: Like everything else you look to do within your micro business, be prepared to research different companies and their offerings. Connect with other (non-competing) business owners to see who they purchased from and ask about their experience and results. It’s important you don’t purchase a list blindly, given the investment needed for designing, printing and mailing.

Ask Questions: Once you have selected a vendor, you’ll want to learn more about their services and how they operate. When researching a specific list to purchase/rent, questions you may want to ask are:

• How was this list obtained?
• When’s the last time the company updated the list?
• If the number of undeliverable emails exceeds X%, is there a buyback amount (refund)?

Certainly you may have other questions, but these are just a few that may not come up in your initial planning stages.

Identify the Right List: As you are looking at different mail lists to purchase, be sure you match your existing customer profile as closely as possible before you rent a list. If you are just getting your business off the ground and do not have any customers you’ll need to look into investing in some basic marketing research to determine your appropriate market. In addition, look to rent your marketing lists as this allows you to test and measure the effectiveness of the list and can be more cost effective.

Don’t forget as you are going through the direct mail process you want to create a campaign that will make your investment worthwhile. Here’s a helpful post we put together a while back on how to create an effective flyer to incorporate into a direct mail campaign.

Has your business utilized direct mail marketing to help grow your business? What recommendations would you share with fellow micro business owners?

Image courtesy of momentummarketing.wordpress.com