Posted by Brian Berg Google+
When it comes to direct mail marketing, one of the key necessities is to stand out and make a memorable “pitch” to your consumer mailing list target. Reaching qualified prospects with impact is crucial. Creating a positive emotion and response with your target, when presenting your marketing, is very important when you want your clients and customers to remember you in a positive manner. Using a newer direct marketing tactic, dimensional mail, is offering marketers new and creative ways to break through the media clutter and stand out to prospects.
A recent Direct Marketing Association’s Response Rate Report stated that dimensional mail averaged the highest overall response rate, at 5.49 percent, of any direct response medium with campaigns for some businesses yielding astronomical response rates of close to 16 percent. The average response rate for other direct mail campaigns was just 2.73 percent.
The key to understanding dimensional mail is for one thing is that it’s not flat, and it typically arrives in a 3D box or a cylindrical tube. Consumer marketers selling packaged goods, for instance, have traditionally used boxed mailings to send product samples to hundreds of thousands of consumer prospects at one time. Unfortunately, only extremely deep-pocketed companies can employ this form of consumer mailing list sampling to reach wide consumer audiences. The good news is, when used to target business-to-business and consumer prospects; dimensional mail campaigns can be dramatically effective in producing results from small, well-qualified, prospects.
Now marketers can create custom small run dimensional mailings. Not all dimensional mailing campaigns are the same, and they certainly do not offer the same results. Depending on creative, and whether or not the campaign is long term or short lived, marketers results can vary, as with any type of campaign.
Here are some ideas for creating a 3D dimensional marketing campaign:
Pre-qualify your list: Because mail that arrives in a box can be hard to resist, dimensional mailings are rarely discarded, making them a great way to get your sales materials seen and noticed by your prospects. Although dimensional mail has a higher per-unit cost than simple flat mail, the cost for your overall campaign can be kept within modest bounds by creating a highly targeted mailing list. It’s critical to get your mailings in the right hands.
Create a memorable campaign: In order to open doors or move prospects further along in the sales cycle, your dimensional mail pieces have to be clever and demonstrate how you’ll meet your prospects’ needs. Be sure to tie your campaign in with your company’s overall marketing and advertising message.
What should you put in your dimensional mail piece? It all depends on the message you want to convey. Just be sure the object is something your prospects will want to keep, and even display, for a while. Avoid overdone advertising specialty items, such as imprinted mugs, and go for something unique. Take some time to think about just what objects would work with your primary message–and what objects your clients would find unique or useful.
Make follow-up a top priority: In most cases, the primary purpose of dimensional mail is to capture the attention of prospects and open the lines of communication. That makes immediate follow-up within one to three business days essential. If your dimensional mail is successful, it’ll warm up your prospects and make them more receptive to your phone call. Of course, with the high response rate of dimensional mail, if your campaign is truly effective, prospects will soon be contacting you.