Direct Mail Marketing Gets Results

Success in business means taking action, noticing what works, and being able to adapt and change.

It isn’t always possible to know what will work ahead of time. When considering marketing tactics like direct mail, print advertising, and telemarketing, the harder you try to pick a guaranteed method, the longer it can take you to get your marketing out where it belongs—into the world.

Planning is crucial to any successful marketing campaign, of course, but it’s too easy for analysis to replace action. A sales letter may never be quite right, a mailing list never as long or as accurate as you would like it. In seeking perfection and guarantees, you get stuck; nothing happens. You might overanalyze your choices, wondering if you are choosing the right one. You might finally pick what you believe is the sure thing and put all your resources into it, and if you’re lucky, it works. This approach is more like gambling than running a business.

You might spend a lot of time trying to make your marketing materials and strategy perfect, but you’ll never know if they’re any good until you try them. In marketing, the point is not in creating the perfect ad, but in getting your ad out and seeing what response you will get from it. You must actually test each marketing strategy or you will have no idea of what will work.

You might approach it scientifically by thinking of yourself as a marketing scientist. Your goal is to try different approaches and track results to discover the successful mix of elements for marketing your product. You start with a hypothesis, or target market or message, special offer, and so forth, and test it, using as many variations as you can imagine, depending on your schedule and budget.

You should try as many options as possible, and before you become attached to any one approach, list the basics, like direct mail, telemarketing, and e-mail, then consider cutting-edge approaches. Run down the list and note which options are free or inexpensive. You can afford to try anything that is risk free. Some examples are cold-calling telemarketing, sales letters, speaking engagements, submitting articles to the local media, and so forth. These approaches are fairly easy to implement, require little or no money, and can get the word out while you design more complex marketing strategies. You can isolate those options that would cost more or be more time consuming. Of these, which may generate the greatest potential for sales and can be accomplished or tested quickly?

You don’t want to blow your entire budget on one or two strategies without first considering all your options and testing as many methods as possible. The results of some methods, of course, such as written articles, will be hard to measure in at first; but tactics that take little time and money can be included as part of a long-term marketing plan. A direct mail test, on the other hand, can generate measurable results almost immediately and, with positive results, justify financing a larger campaign.