Three Winning Recommendations for Getting Your Mail Shot Letters Opened

By Ruth Williams

Consider what your own actions are when you receive promotional mail through the post. The chances are you create three piles – an A-pile, with the things you’re interested in, a B-pile maybe the bills and magazines you want to keep, but don’t want immediately, and a C-pile, with things you’ll throw out without opening. If you are sending out direct mail it is obvious that you need your mail to be in the first pile and not the last.

Personalise

If a mail shot is personalised it is far more likely to get attention. Handwritten envelopes with a stamp on are the most successful way of getting the recipient to open it. Don’t address the letter to the ‘Home Owner’ or ‘Occupier’. Those impersonal touches will get your mailing thrown into the trash without a second glance. Avoid using a font which mimics hand writing. These types of fonts fool nobody.

Change the appearance of upcoming mailings

It is important to create variety. If someone opens your letter, sees it’s a mass-mailing and decides they’re not interested, they’ll throw away any similar looking letters in the future. Vary the look of the envelope by sometimes using printed envelopes, sometimes using window envelopes and sometimes using plain envelopes. Different people will react in different ways to your mailing, some people may open a window envelope because it looks like a bill but not a plain envelope if it’s not addressed to them.

Keep testing

This should be standard practice for any marketing strategy. Identify what variations occurred for each mail shot and log the responses accordingly. It should be possible to identify which mail shot appearance created a greater response. Take on board any feedback and keep trying new things. You can build on those strategies which had yielded positive response rates. If you get a better response, you can evolve your current program into the new one. You can break down recipients into groups depending on whether or not they had previously responded, then send a mailing design which they may be more likely to respond to. You’ll have a strong response from the first group, followed by another strong response from your second mailing with the second group.

Mail shots aren’t always going to be opened, and even those that are may not get a response. However, there are ways of generating the best results possible by following these few strategies.

Well designed, printed envelopes can dramatically increase the open rate of your mail shot.

Article kindly provided by UberArticles.com

Topics: Marketing | Comments Off

Tags: campaign, envelopes, mail shot, Marketing, marketing strategy, printed envelopes, recipients, response rate

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