If you look at response rates to direct mail campaigns, or any marketing campaign for that matter, generally the statistics are simply measured as a percentage of people that responded. However, bigger is not always better, and these statistics don’t always show the quality of these responses.

How many customers actually ended up purchasing? How many of these customers became repeat customers? We’ve looked at the importance of both quality and quantity when it comes to direct mail response rates in this latest blog article.

Measuring both the quality and quantity of responses in direct mail

It’s so important with any campaign to have as many fields as possible in place when it comes to your data so that you can analyse just how effective it’s been. Only measuring response rate, while still a good indication of success, doesn’t do enough to show you how you can change things next time.

If you offer 50% off a product in your first piece of direct mail and you have a huge response rate, then great. But if you hardly have any repeat customers from this, chances are they only purchased your product because of the discount, and not because they want to buy again. These are all factors you must consider and analyse in a direct mail campaign.

Statistics about direct mail response rates

For example, we can analyse the latest email statistics in terms of both quality and quantity to see the huge gap here. On average, around 20% of promotional emails are opened across all industries, although this drops to 16% for some industries and rises to 28% for other industries.

However, the actual percentage of people that click the links in these emails is as low as 2% or 3%. While this isn’t a measure of the quality of the people clicking through, it simply shows how important it is to look at all of the factors in response rates when conducting a direct marketing campaign.

Another way in which response rates can be improved is through increasing data quality, the removal of duplicate records, goneaways and correction of errors will all in their own ways lead to improvements in data quality.

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Retaining customers

The ultimate aim for any business is to retain customers. If you score a huge response rate on your direct mail campaign but don’t retain any customers, then chances are you’ll have to run another direct mail campaign. The cost of running these low response continuous campaigns will keep eating away at your profits and reduce the likelihood of future campaigns being signed off by management.

You want to run a direct mail campaign that has a good response rate and ensures that you have continuous paying customers; you’ll then be more than making your money back on the direct mail campaign that you ran.

There are a few optimisation techniques you can use to do this:

• Personalise your direct mail – optimise the mailing so that it is much more personalised to the specific requirements of the recipient
• Make your direct mail eye-catching – make it stand out from the crowd, there is competition on the doormat and the mailing needs to stand out from the competitors mailings
• Include product samples within your direct mail – this can be very effective, “you have tried it, now buy it”, style of approach

Increasing the quantity and quality of your response rates

There are many other ways that you can help to increase both the quality and quantity of your response rates. Here at the bakergoodchild direct mail agency, we’ve been helping businesses run successful direct mail campaigns for many years. Let us help your direct mail campaign too, we can plan, provide direct mail printing and postage and more! Call us on 0800 612 1972 today.

Read our blog on 5 Essential Rules for B2C Direct Mail by clicking here. 

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