If are looking at developing a direct mail campaign, you have probably already considered the unique advantages a direct mail campaign provides including:

• Precise targeting of intended market
• Scalability based on budget or fulfillment potential
• Fast feedback cycle
• Ability to experiment with different appeals or offers
• Ability to experiment with different markets

There are three primary elements of a direct mail campaign. They are:

Direct mail experts generally subscribe to the 40/40/20 rule of thumb. That is, a direct mail campaigns effectiveness is 40% driven by the mailing list, 40% by the offer, and 20% by the creative package. For each of these elements, however, there are factors which can be manipulated and optimized. Doing so can make the difference between whether or not your campaign delivers the results you desire!

The List The mailing list is the most critical factor to your direct mail campaigns success. As a first step you will want to properly develop the target audience for your product or service with careful analysis. This will help you refine your mailing list criteria. A well established approach is to analyze your existing customer base and focus on the pool of customers which you would define as your "best." If you are seeking to expand your customer base, or are breaking into a new market, you can work with a marketing company to acquire a target mailing list.  Focusing on this list to be as accurate and as targeted as possible will improve the likelihood that you will reach your intended target audience for your product or service. The more targeted your list is, the more likely you will be successful with responses.

The Offer Direct Mail campaigns are most successful when an offer or incentive is included for the customer to buy your product or service. The offer or incentive can be a promotion, a giveaway, a discount, or money. The more intrinsically valuable your offer is perceived to be, the more likely your target audience will respond. The key is to weigh the cost of the offer with the expected return.

The Creative Package Think about the amount of mail you receive daily. This will remind you that you are competing with volumes of other solicitors when launching your direct mail campaign. Therefore, you will need to design your direct mail piece to be visually appealing to capture the attention of your target audience.

To make sure your message gets read, you will want to consider the formatting and font types, using bolding, italicizing, underlining, and all capital letters to highlight certain words or phrases to catch the readers attention. Using bullet points, headlines, and short sentences can help keep the readers attention. Make sure that your critical messages, such as what your product is, what the benefits are, what your offer is, and what the reader needs to do and by when, are clear and concise. It is also very important that your direct mail piece does not have errors, either in grammar or in the information or offer, nor looks sloppy in appearance.

Remember to make sure you repeat your call to action, or what it is you are asking your reader to do. This should be stated somewhere in the middle and again at the end.

The outer envelope is the first opportunity to reach your target. It will be this that determines whether your direct mail piece gets read or gets thrown away. Often times compelling reasons to get a reader to open the envelope includes an offer or benefit message, or sometimes, addressing the envelope by hand can compel the target to open the envelope.

Testing and Tracking Results A benefit of direct mail campaigns is that the campaigns can be varied slightly to test different approaches, such as modifying the offer or changing the appearance of the creative, to see what yields better results.

You will want to track the results of your direct mail campaign whether you modify approaches within a campaign, or just to track its effectiveness versus other selling results. A simple way to do this is to establish promotion codes and/or coupons which the customer is required to use when responding.

Budgeting When you establish a budget for your direct mail campaign, you will want to consider such expenses as mailing lists, paper, printing, postage, offer/incentive, mail sort, and professional services for creative.

Measuring Success How can you determine if the cost of a direct mail campaign has been worth it? A tangible measure can be ROI (return on investment), calculated to be the total program expense minus the additional money generated as a direct result of the campaign.

Direct mail campaigns can be a highly effective marketing approach. They are amenable to high target selectivity, personalization, testing, and allow you to measure results. Once you familiarize yourself with how to create a successful campaign, you will come back to this approach again and again.