Direct Mail Still Yields the Lowest Cost-Per-Lead and Highest Conversion Rate

According to the DMA’s Fact book for 2013, 65% of consumers aged 16 – 65 have made a purchase as a result of Direct Mail. In addition to this, the average response rate for DM was 4.4% for both B2B and B2C mailings—considerably higher than industry expectations, and surging past E-Mails response rate of just 0.12%.

Cost Per Lead about the Same as Email…
Some may argue that it still costs more to send a mail shot, as opposed to sending out an email. What they don’t take into account is the ROI. – The raw cost of a campaign isn’t the true test of success. Cost per lead is. The DMA reports that the cost per lead of Direct Mail is in line with print and pay-per-click, and significantly less than telemarketing. Direct Mail production costs are somewhat more than email, but not enough to make email the holy grail of direct marketing.

Cost Per Lead Comparison

Source: DMA, 2012 Response Rate Report & Central Mailing Services: Direct Mail vs Email

With a higher conversion rate than any other medium, the Print on Demand Institute found that Direct Mail out-pulled all other channels tested in terms of conversion rates, both for lead-generating “free” offers and one-step “buy now” offers. Direct Mail’s edge becomes even more dramatic when it is optimized with personalization and other factors, and combined with personalized landing pages.

Direct Mail enjoys a longer “shelf life” than email, so it might be profitable to evaluate your existing landing pages and offers to see what can be repurposed to offer through Direct Mail. If you do, remember that people may access it weeks after the mailing, so make sure that the pages and offers are still good—or put a firm deadline on response time.

Try Postcards
Direct Mail doesn’t have to be large and expensive to be effective. Research has found that postcards will be most likely read or scanned. This maybe because postcards don’t take much time to read. This means that to be effective, the prospect needs to understand your offer within 3 seconds of glancing at it.

Break Out of the Mailbox
If you are using envelopes, you already know that the only purpose of the packaging is to make sure the mail piece gets opened and the contents read. Take the time to test the messaging on the outside. Tweak the wording or rephrase altogether to see if one version works better than another.

Get Personal
Personalized communications continue to out-do generic approaches in all categories. But using a person’s name is just the beginning—the content needs to be personalized as well. For example, if you are marketing high tech products that run on different platforms, users will have different hot buttons. A generic message that focuses on only one platform will not be relevant to other customers. Wording that tries to cover issues for all platforms will be cumbersome and uninteresting to most recipients. It’s worth the extra time and small expense to assure that your piece says the right thing to the right people.

Timing Is Everything
Direct Mail campaigns used to take weeks to execute because of the time it took to develop concepts, print, etc. That can still be true of large and elaborate campaigns, but now marketers can take advantage of digital print-on-demand.

Many businesses recognize that Direct Mail is at an all time high; in fact most of them enjoy the high response rates that Direct Mail Produces, so much so that they use it relentlessly throughout the year.
Here at CMS We help you to add personalization and uniqueness where ever you can with your campaign to get your message noticed and avoid getting lost in a pile of envelopes, making your campaign the best it can be to generate repeat business. Contact us today!

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