Maximizing Direct Mail Conversion Rates
One of the biggest problems with direct mail marketing is that you don’t know you’ve got it right until you’ve already spent money on design, printing and distribution. Even then, given the lack of real opportunity for tracking results, you can only base your perceived results on instinct rather than cold hard figures. Be that as it may, there are steps you can take at the creative stages to ensure your direct mail is as optimized for conversion as it can be in order to deliver a high return on your investment.
A great deal of optimizing your direct mail for conversion rates relies on common sense and, in a way, taking marketing to its most basic level. Too often it can be easy to confuse things and look for more complicated solutions to the problem where a simple course of action would suffice.
Consumers convert better when things are marked out for them in an easy-to-understand format. If you want a prospect to give you a call, don’t just put a phone number on the bottom of your flier and hope for the best. While most people understand that the phone number listed on an advertisement is for contact purposes – actually instructing them to give you a call in simple terms might have a marked increase in those that actually do pick up the phone.
Pushing the Freeline As a Marketing Strategy
If you’ve been around the marketing community for any length of time, you’ve likely heard the ‘experts’ mention ‘pushing the freeline’. This basically means providing high quality products and services to qualified prospects for free in a bid to convert them into customers later down the line. While this tactic is quite common in Internet marketing, it’s not used so often outside of this very narrow market. However, pushing the freeline has tremendous advantages in almost any industry and should be leveraged to a far greater degree to increase customer loyalty and warm up prospects for an eventual sale.
The theory suggests that by luring prospects through your store or website with ongoing free goods and services, you’ll eventually catch those that might not have bought from you the first time around as prospects. Eventually you will have the opportunity to build a long-term relationship with these individuals based on the strength of the real value you have provided them for free.
Keep in touch with your target market
Most of the real money in marketing is in effective follow up of prospects as opposed to capturing new clients. Any kind of email follow up that gives genuine value and makes an attempt to pre-educate prospects and post-educate clients is likely to be VERY effective. According to a recent study by DMA, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing was $40.56 for every dollar spent in 2011. This number is only expected to drop to $39.40 in 2012, when it will account for $67.8 billion in sales. Few other advertising mediums offer such a huge potential return.
Email Marketing Is Still Effective
Since we are currently experiencing one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, millions of people around the world have certainly felt the impact. However, this does not mean that all is bleak from a business standpoint.
Despite the economic climate, many companies both large and small have managed to maintain their sales levels or even increase them by utilizing email marketing. That’s how powerful this strategy can be. While this is not the sole reason why companies have been able to survive, it certainly is not one to be ignored. It has it has been proven to produce results and an incredible return on investment. This not only applies to online businesses, but offline ones as well.
