Direct mail

Why it survives

Because it goes exactly where you point it. Broadcast sells a market; digital sells an audience definition you cannot inspect. Direct mail is bought by carrier route, which means you can put a piece in 4,200 specific households in the neighbourhoods where your last forty jobs came from, and nowhere else.

For a home improvement business, a senior care community or anything with a service radius, that is a structural advantage. A remodeler in Lakeville does not need the north metro to see anything.

How we plan it

• Model on your own customers first. Before buying a list, we look at where your existing jobs came from. Housing stock age, household income and tenure usually predict a category better than any purchased selects do.
• Saturation or targeted, chosen deliberately. Every-door saturation mail is cheap per piece and wasteful if your buyer is a narrow slice. A modelled list costs more per piece and less per lead. Which one wins depends entirely on how common your customer is.
• Timed against the rest of the plan. Mail landing in the same week as a television flight performs differently from mail landing in a quiet week. That is a scheduling decision, made on the plan.
• Tracked properly. A distinct phone number or landing page per drop, so the result is attributable rather than assumed.

Where it goes wrong

Mostly in the creative, not the list. A mailer competing with a fistful of other mail has about a second to say who it is for and what the offer is. Clever gets thrown away. We produce mail creative to be scanned in that second, and we would rather run a plain piece that is legible than an art-directed one that is not.

The other common failure is a single drop. One mailer to a route is a test, not a campaign. Frequency applies here exactly as it does on air.