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Mail Profits: Using the Mail to Build Your Business
Each day the United States Postal Service collects, processes, and delivers more than 650 million pieces of mail. A large percentage of that volume is made up of business mail designed to get new customers or make repeat sales to existing customers. Here are tips on how you can use the mail to bring in business.
How can businesses use the mail to market their products or services?
There are probably as many ways to use the mail as a marketing tool as there are ways for you to communicate with prospects and customers. Here are just a few ideas:
- Send out traditional direct mail packages (several pieces of sales literature in one package—typically a letter, brochure, and response card or return envelope aimed at getting the prospect to place an order immediately).
- Send out sales letters designed to get the prospect to call and make an appointment to talk to you about some product or service you sell.
- Send out a newsletter to prospects to demonstrate your expertise and drum up sales for your business.
- Send out invitations to an open house or other event designed to drum up business.
- Send out postcards telling customers and prospects about a special sale
- Send reminders about services people need to purchase periodically (oil change or health checkups, for instance).
- Send a package of coupons for items in your retail store to people in your local area.
- Send catalogs listing new and old products.
What kind of response does direct mail get?
Most mailers are satisfied if a mailing to a rented list of targeted prospects gets a 1 percent response (in other words, if 1 person out of 100 responds to the mailing). That figure goes down to one-tenth of 1 percent or less if the list you mail to is a residential mailing list (rather than a list of people who share a specific interest). It goes up—often to 5 percent or more—if you are mailing to a list of customers who have purchased from you in the past. With a mailing, as with advertising, response rates are important for planning and estimating; however, what really matters is the cost of getting the customer and the long-term profitability of the customer. If you are selling one item by mail, you will need to look closely at how many responses you will need to make a profit in order to determine if the mailing is worth doing.
Is it less expensive to use the mail to get customers than it is to advertise in magazines or newspapers?
It depends on what kind of mailing you are doing. If you are trying to sell products that compete with commercial items, and you will be mailing out expensive sales literature, you could easily spend as much to reach 5,000 people with a direct mail piece as you would spend to put an ad in a publication reaching tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. However, your mailing might have a better chance of being seen and read than an ad would, thereby getting more responses and orders. If you are a freelancer or a small service business that sells to other businesses, you could send out a simple sales letter to a hand-picked list of 50 or 100 likely prospects for less than $50 and possibly land one or more clients who will give you thousands of dollars' worth of work.
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