#DMGuru: Tips for Personalising your Direct Mail campaign
In our last blog we talked about personalising direct mail and how this one aspect of direct mail marketing can have a massive impact on the returns from your campaign at no extra cost to you.
Personalised direct mail can be used in many different ways, depending on what the client wants from the campaign and who the recipients are. There are all kinds of ways in which you can keep your direct mail within budget while packing plenty of extra punch.
Here are some favourite tips from direct mail experts at The Mailing People to help get your mail marketing campaign off to a good start.
Different types of direct mail personalisation
When we talk with clients about personalising for direct mail, the first thing they often think of is contact details. In fact, names and addresses aren’t true personalisation. Yes – it’s important to make sure that contact details are individual and correct, but true personalisation takes this marketing trick a whole lot further, building a relationship between you and your audience and ensuring a better return on investment.
When it comes to personalisation, think bigger. Anything in your mailing can be made individual and personal. 1,000 different customers can have 1,000 different messages.
Have you got a good image?
The more you do with your personalisation, the better the response rate. A great way to get a strong message across and invite a response is through using personalised images.
Here’s a great example of using personalised images that we recently undertook at The Mailing People:
Our client sells branded clothing and workwear. This could be anything from chef jackets with the logo of a restaurant to high vis jackets with a company logo for the construction industry.
We worked with our client on some very effective sales psychology by personalising the images for every single business that would receive the brochure. Image personalisation involved adding the logo of each individual recipient organisation to the photographs of the workwear.
For example, the mailing received by Clipclop Security showed jackets with the Clipclop Security logo on, while Ethelred’s Electrics received a brochure showing polo shirts with the Ethelred’s Electrics logo on.
It’s powerful because it works on the subconscious of the recipient. It puts them several steps ahead on the path to purchase, through using an image of the bespoke product they’ll receive when they buy.
Do more with your text
When it comes to text, personalisation isn’t just about the headline stuff. You can personalise a whole paragraph to target an individual or group of people. Even extensive text personalisation won’t cost you any more. If the client creates individual information and includes it in the data that the mailing house receives, then the direct mail company can add it. Simple as that.
The Mailing People code the data received and digital printing technology does the rest. The digital printer knows where to place paragraphs, images and so forth. (With careful direction from the human mailing experts!)
Divide your audience into groups
Personalised text won’t always be individual. When you’re doing a bulk mail campaign, it pays to think of groups within it –by locality or age-group, perhaps.
For example, a national campaign might well get more buy-in if it contains photography and images with local relevance to recipients. It might be a question of personalising for different UK locations using different photographs for customers in England, Scotland and Wales. Or you may want to use five separate images to make your message more accessible to people living in the North East, North West, Midlands, South East and South West.
Everything we do at The Mailing People is personalised. That’s because our long experience in direct mail marketing shows us the impact it has on recipient response. When it comes to personalisation, it’s just a question of how much. And how much you need depends on what you want to get across.
The heavier the personalisation the more it will be tailored to individual customers. The more tailored your mail, the more likely it is to get a response.
If you’d like more ideas on direct mail personalisation give us a call. We love to share our experience and creativity with clients!
