If you are an SME business owner or manager, then you know that marketing can be tough. There are so many different options out there, and it can be hard to know which ones will work best for your company. One marketing channel that is often overlooked by SME’s is direct mail. Direct mail is still a highly effective way to reach new customers and grow your business. In this blog post, we will discuss 5 tips for using direct mail effectively in your SME business’s marketing strategy!
Tip # 1
One important tip to remember when using direct mail is to make sure your target market is clear. Who are you trying to reach with your marketing campaign? If you are an SME business it’s likely your target audience will be based on location or your business’s niche, so start collecting details from your current customers. If you can find out what those contacts have in common, you will be ready to start identifying what your typical customer looks like. Using this information to create your outreach strategy will ensure that you are sending your mailers to the right people, at the right time.
Tip # 2
Another good tip for using direct mail is to personalise your mailers as much as possible. Include the recipient’s name on the envelope, and make sure the content of your letter is relevant to their interests. Personalisation goes far beyond just using their name & people are more likely to respond to a well personalised mailer. It can be a small extra expense ‘per pack’ but it is a tried and tested method. According to a recent study, response rates for personalised mail can be up to 250% higher than non-personalised, so it makes sense to prioritise personalisation!
Tip # 3
Be creative with your direct mail campaigns! Your goal is to stand out from the rest. One way to do this is to use unique shapes and sizes for your mailers. You can also include fun elements like scratch cards or free gifts, the more fun and enticing you can make a call to action, the more likely you are to see a response from the recipient. Use your niche to your advantage and come up with some clever and unique ways to engage your audience.
If the audience for your SME business is local, you’re already at an advantage as you can send invites to events or promotional days at your premises. Try to use locality to your advantage if you can!
Tip # 4
If you can’t send out invites to events and see your results in the form of footfall for your business, then you need to find other ways to track your results so that you can see what is and isn’t working. There are a few ways you can do this a little easier than you might imagine. QR codes or unique web addresses can have their engagement tracked, so only those who received your mailout can access them, meaning you can use easily accessible KPIs to see how much your mail is catching attention.
Give the consumer a reason to engage, we’ve talked about the importance of a call to action, and this again rings true here. The easiest and most fruitful way to measure the success of your campaign is getting the recipient to reach out to you directly, so keep that in mind when producing your CTA. You will notice more calls, emails or web traffic, if you give your audience a good reason to get in touch.
Tip # 5
Finally, don’t forget to follow up with your customers after they receive your direct mail! Again, it is an expense, but ensuring your brand and its message is seen by your audience multiple times will heighten engagement. For some businesses, sending out one campaign might be enough, but for many, especially smaller businesses where brand recognition might be weak, it is important to keep pushing your message, so it sticks. There’s a reason a lot of online shops bombard you with offers for items you added to a basket and didn’t purchase, and that’s because reminders work! Get people to remember and trust your brand by following up with more correspondence.
We hope these tips have been helpful in getting you started with using direct mail for your SME! If you have any questions, or if you would like to learn more about our mailing services, please contact the bakergoodchild team today and we would love to help.
