This page contains an archive of all entries with the category direct mail. Oldest entries appear first.
Over the years, I've built up a collection of select VDP applications, both good and bad. One of the worst VDP applications that I've ever received was a direct mail postcard from a VDP vendor promoting their software.
The DM postcard was sent by Datalogics promoting their DL Formatter VDP product (now Printable FusionPro). I received mailer in 2004, shortly before Datalogics sold their assets and technologies in DL Formatter to Printable.
Continue reading "VDP Hall of Shame" »
Posted on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Business news site MarketWatch published a story this month on how junk mail is spurring printer sales. I'm not sure how helpful the classification 'junk mail' is, I assume the author referring to personalised direct mail, rather than unaddressed mail.
The article identifies that DM is the only offline media today which can reach the consumer effectively. Other channels, including e-mail, TV and telephone, are blocked either through filtering technology or regulations (i.e. Do Not Call register).
The article goes on to provide some interesting figures, stating that DM is the fastest-growing form of advertising off the Internet, and is projected to drive sales growth by 5.3% a year from between now and 2012. By comparison, television ads are seen driving sales growth by 5%, newspapers by 0.9%, magazines by 3% and radio by 3% over the same period of time. Altogether, the U.S. direct mail printing business is a $62.2 billion market that's expected to grow around 6%, or 7 billion pages a year. That's a lot of paper. And rainforests.
Read the full story on MarketWatch »
Posted on Monday, 17 December 2007 at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm continually surprised when I receive direct mail pieces, usually in letter format, set in Courier. Why choose Courier? There are a tonne of other, more attractive and legible typefaces available. Marketing organisations surely can't select Courier based on its readability; Courier is anything but readable; I'd rather read a pleasant Serif typeface any day. However, Courier correspondence continues to trickle through my letterbox each week.
Continue reading "What the Font?" »
Posted on Sunday, 9 March 2008 at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
I picked up a story today on the eco-warrior US organisation, ForestEthics, who are running a 'Do Not Mail' campaign to stop so-called junk mail. The campaign is really just a petition, which currently lists "nearly 20,000" petitioners. ForestEthics explain that unwanted mail is making a significant impact on our environment, citing the number of trees used to produce the 100 billion mail pieces across the US and other eco-stats.
Now, I'm certainly no eco-warrior, but I do care for the environment. Having said that, I don't agree with ForestEthics approach to what is, apparently a propaganda-style campaign, intended to pour guilt on un-informed consumers. For example, ForestEthics state that "the Canadian Boreal Forest is logged at a rate of two acres a minute to produce paper products". However, they conveniently fail to mention that Canada is a global leader in sustainable forest management and has a deforestation rate of zero.
Continue reading "Do Not Mail Petition" »
Posted on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Many challenges are plaguing direct mail today; high postage costs, diminished consumer response rates and increased mailbox "clutter" are all impacting campaign ROI. The solution? Look at optimising the postal process. That's the finding of a new white paper released today by Winterberry Group.
The white paper, titled 'A Strategy for Savings: Postal Optimization and the Future of Direct Mail', explores opportunities now emerging around the development of comprehensive postal optimisation strategies, which integrate multiple cost-saving direct mail production techniques like commingling, copalletisation and drop-shipping, in a manner that drives unique incremental value for all mailing sizes.
Continue reading "Postal Optimisation" »
Posted on Tuesday, 25 March 2008 at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A report published by Target Marketing this month assessing media usage in 2008, indicates that direct mail is still the media channel of choice for customer acquisition and comes a close second for customer retention.
Continue reading "Media Usage in 2008" »
Posted on Thursday, 27 March 2008 at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
This week, I heard from Mike and Nate at Junk Mail Galaxy. The duo publish regular video podcasts, which focus on direct mail. Based in South Jersey (in the US, not my home island in the Channel Islands), they have 30 years of experience in direct mail between them.
In their regular podcasts, Mike and Nate explore the world of direct mail, looking at DM news, sharing their views and squeezing in a few jokes along the way. They only launched their Web site in January this year, but are quickly building up a library of podcasts. Each podcast episode features a supporting blog entry, so you can read what's in the episode before playing it, which is a good idea as each m4v file is around 50MB (which takes forever to download on my cheap-o broadband service). Yes, the videos aren't for faint hearted broadband connections, but if you're on a shoestring Australian broadband connection like mine, then look out for the 'embedable player' link, which takes you to a smaller, online streaming version.
Continue reading "Junk Mail Galaxy" »
Posted on Friday, 11 April 2008 at 6:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
PODi are hosting a webinar titled 'Making money by mailing at the moment when it makes the most sense' on Wednesday 23rd April at 11am and 7pm EDT (Thursday 24th April 1am and 9am, Sydney time). The webinar, presented by Tom McDermott from AmazingMail, is aimed at print providers and provides advice on how to make direct mail both relevant and successful. Its free for PODi members and US$125 for others.
» Sign up for the PODi Webinar
Posted on Friday, 18 April 2008 at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Alan Rosenspan runs a direct marketing services company in the US and has won many awards for direct marketing creativity and results. Among several published titles, Alan has published a popular and highly recommended booklet titled '101 Ways to Improve Your Response'. The booklet features tried and tested tips to ensure DM success.
Across his list of 101 tips, the repeating theme in this booklet appears to be 'one-to-one communication'. Alan explains that "a letter should be a one-to-one communication from one individual to another" and the best method to enable this level of communication is to incorporate personalisation. Among Alan's 101 list, I've pulled the following personalisation tips:
Continue reading "Personalisation Works" »
Posted on Sunday, 20 April 2008 at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
QR (Quick Response) Codes are gaining a lot of interest in Australia. For those who aren't familar with these little marks, a QR Code is a two-dimensional bar code that can be used in convenience-oriented applications for mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). Using an encoded URL, a QR Code can incorporated in outdoor and print media advertising, including signs, buses, newspapers. A mobile phone user can use the integrated camera in their phone to capture the QR Code, then use reader software on the phone to decode the barcode into the URL and view the Web page in a browser.
Posted on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
We're trapped in a paradigm. Many CRM systems offer APIs to enable add-on services, including SalesForce.com with their AppExchange or SugarCRM, a popular open-source CRM solution. And there are many systems integrators and service providers who are already offering integration into these CRM systems using data directly from these CRM systems—but no one appears to be doing this for non-transactional direct marketing campaigns.
There's an irony here. This isn't really a technical limitation—many vendors such as XMPie, Pageflex and others are busy touting support for enterprise-grade database systems including MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2 and others, but no one is integrating direct marketing campaigns directly into their CRM systems, outside of transactional mail (i.e. bills and statements).
Continue reading "CRM Data and DM" »
Posted on Friday, 26 September 2008 at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Westpac, one of Australia's largest banks, ran a direct mail campaign a few years ago to current their cardholders promoting the new Altitude American Express card as a complimentary rewards-earning credit card. If you live in Australia, then you might already be familiar with this award-winning campaign. While this campaign is now somewhat dated, I'd still like to share it as its success was in its relative simplicity.
As the campaign targeted existing cardholders, Westpac could provide comprehensive data on these customers. Westpac leveraged this data together with their existing customer relationship to emphasise the potential rewards of taking up the new card.
Continue reading "Westpac Cross-Sell" »
Posted on Monday, 6 October 2008 at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
I really don't like using barcodes in direct mail. I usually try to avoid them. Wherever you place them on the mailer, they disturb the creative and just don't "look good". But sometimes you don't have a choice, like when you're running a redemption campaign where the recipient has to redeem the offer by presenting their mail piece (with a trackable barcode) in-store.
Continue reading "Barcode Designs" »
Posted on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
In an effort to address the UK's declining direct mail volumes, Royal Mail hired Proximity London to create a sensory-based direct mail campaign. The agency used a chocolate mailing, which was contained in a heat-sensitive cover and was sent to 6,000 people at marketing and creative agencies in the UK to show how use of sensory mail could improve response rates on direct campaigns. A paper copy accompanied the chocolate letter in case recipients ate it.
The letter was designed to encourage the target audience to smell, touch and taste it, and explains the principle of engaging the senses to create more emotive connections with customers.
Continue reading "Chocolate Direct Mail" »
Posted on Friday, 28 November 2008 at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Australian retail giant, Myer, has disclosed that during 2009 it will focus it's marketing spend on targeted, direct marketing to Myer One card holders--in fact it will spend more on DM to store card holders than all of its other advertising put together. Myer explained that they plan to leverage their customer data from their existing 2.7 million card holders, who are clustered into groups and segmented into three tiers (based on annual spend). The intent of Myer's DM focus is to become more relevant to their customers.
Other FMCG businesses should be taking a leaf out of Myer's marketing strategy. In the current economy, targeted relevant marketing is key to influencing customer purchasing behaviour—and retaining them.
Posted on Monday, 13 April 2009 at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)