Direct Marketing's Impact - Positive and Negative

It is funny to think that in the age, when we use the internet even to vote for the president and to find love, snail mail marketing and sales letters are still so big.

In fact, a well thought out direct marketing campaign can bring more results than a combined effort of your best online marketing experts.

The recipients, i.e. our potential customers, call this type of marketing simply junk mail. And right they are indeed, because the majority of the sales letters that are being stuck down our mailboxes are junk. They don’t work and they don’t sell - they’re just wrongly written and wrongly presented. With the next series of articles we will look into the best practices of the conventional direct mail marketing, how to write compelling sales letters and how to present them.

Direct Mail & Ecology

Direct mail is condemned by Green activists. Environmental Protection Agency of USA has estimated that 44% of junk mail remains unread and only one third of all disposed junk mail gets recycled properly. In addition, House of Commons, UK carried out a research and found out that almost 600,000 tonnes of paper had been used in direct mail campaigns in the UK in 2002 (total of 3,7 million tonnes of paper was used in UK for marketing/promotion/packaging activities altogether). The main concern is that the most of this wasted paper doesn’t get recycled. UK, contrary to USA, recycles not more than 15% of its junk mail!

Anyway, direct mail can give you as a marketer lots of new opportunities. You can send samples, catalogues, coupons, offers, introductions, solicitations - anything. You are only limited by your imagination and budget because direct mail marketing is not cheap.

Why Direct Mail Marketing Works?

Direct mail marketers use the laziness of prospective customers as the basis for their sales pitch. It is very convenient to order products through a catalogue that gets mailed right to your door, and many people do order - even things that they not particularly need.

To be successful, direct mail campaign should be targeted, personalized, informative and a bit fun. It should stand out from the stream of bland stream of junk letters.