Creating an Effective B2B Direct Mail Campaign
by MGB2B
It just needs to work a lot harder. For B2B companies, the advent of email marketing has implied the decline, if not the impending doom of printed direct mail as a part of their marketing mixes. Yet, while we all realize that email is great, it can be just as easily ignored as any other advertising medium. In a survey of nearly 500 marketing and business professionals, 57% of whom operate in the B2B sector, participants reported that direct mail marketing generated a response rate 37 times higher than email marketing when sent to curated lists, and 10 times higher when sent to purchased lists. As you begin to develop your B2B direct mail campaign, follow these 3 proven steps for a strong impact:
- Build a strong, accurate list. You should make sure that you have a mailing list of individuals and businesses that are qualified potential customers. Your targets should either be likely to respond to an introductory offer or already know who you are and be ready to be pushed further through the sales funnel and contact you. It’s also important to keep your lists up-to-date – people leave jobs all the time, and you waste money by continuing to send their mail to the wrong place.
- Include an offer or a specific message. Your printed direct mail piece is not the place for general branding. Including an offer of a free sample or product trial increases your chances of engagement with your audience(s). You also might consider including an announcement of a new product or service or a limited-time discount. The most important part here is that you include a reason for someone to contact you.
- Provide a clear call to action. You want to track people to find out how they heard about you and test whether your program is working. Which brings us to #4.
- Create a custom landing page or promotional code so you can track the effectiveness of your campaign. You can’t track open rates and click throughs like you can in an email campaign, so you need to make sure that you are doing everything you can to see who is actually responding to your mailing. If you include a phone number, make sure your employees answering calls know to ask “How did you hear about us?” And if you include a link to your website you should create a unique landing page or vanity url so you can go back and see how many people visited that page after the mailing has been released.
- Create a quality piece. Since you have a qualified list, you need to make sure you are doing your product and business justice by creating a quality mailing. There are lots of affordable options for direct mail, but you need to remember that your printed mailer will be one of many that a recipient will see on any given day. How are you going to stand out? Will your piece use special printing techniques like spot glosses, embossing, or custom die cuts. How will you make the photography and the design distinctive from what your target will receive from competitors?
- Test and tweak. Just as you are (or should be) doing with your digital marketing efforts, testing variations of your B2B direct mail campaign can help you identify the messages, designs, and audiences that produce the best results. Split test different headlines within the same audience, or experiment with purchased versus custom lists. The feedback will help you improve your next campaign and more deeply understand your target audiences.
In the words of content marketing evangelist Joe Pulizzi, “What if you could be at a trade show that none of your competitors were at? That’s print right now.” Drop us a line and we can begin to help you develop a campaign and a plan that will get noticed by the right people.
Tags: B2B direct mail campaign, B2B direct mail statistics, B2B marketing strategy, direct mail, does direct mail work for B2B, how to use direct mail in B2B