Waste is a major challenge for every organization, regardless of the marketing channel or medium. When you invest in content marketing, you run the risk of creating collateral too quickly. Properly scaling acquisition and retention campaigns are crucial, but it can’t be your final goal. Essentially, don’t send an abundance of marketing content to a broad audience blindly. You can’t assume that by advertising to a broad audience on a massive scale, something will probably stick. You leave too much up to chance by using this tactic and could spend far more than you need to.
Instead, take a steady, methodical approach to build your direct mail growth from the ground-up. Here are some steps you can follow to scale your direct mail advertising.
Sanity Check Your List and Messaging
The success of any direct mail campaign starts with the integrity of your mailing list. The problem with most mail lists is that they become outdated quickly. One way you can check the integrity of your mail is through data.
- Cross-check your list with your customer relationship management (CRM) data and then sanity check a sample. See if behavioral patterns and characteristics sync up.
- Work with a third-party list provider. These companies focus on high-integrity and high-quality lists with accurate user data. Instead of collecting and maintaining the information yourself, you can license what you need to ensure your list is of excellent quality.
Test a Batch to Identify Wins and Losses
Testing a batch of direct mail helps you identify wins and losses before scaling your campaign. After you validate your list, you can establish your messaging strategy. The purpose is to determine your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses. See what works and what doesn’t work. Continue adjusting your segmentation, list-optimization, and messaging until you find a formula that works. Take the necessary steps needed to reconfigure and course-correct your efforts.
Here are some elements of your campaign you should test and track:
- Target Segmentation: Segment your audience based on your campaign goals and intended outreach.
- Offers and CTAs: You should test different offers, offer values, and ways of positioning offers.
- Response Curve: You can analyze early responses for faster test reads.
- Messaging: You should always focus your messaging toward your target audience. Make your messaging correspond with your audiences’ likes, needs, and wants.
- Formats: A new format can sometimes breathe life into a mailer.
There are more testing options, but the above options are great starting choices for you to focus on when identifying what works for your organization and its audience.
Scale Your Wins
After sanity checking and testing batches, you will have a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t. At this point, you can end the unsuccessful campaigns and double-down on your successes with direct mail scaling. Scaling up is easy and cost-effective. Automation becomes a factor during the scaling stage. You won’t need to deal with the lag time of building your campaigns manually. You can scale your successes quickly while cutting through the noise of your competitors and reaching your target audiences more successfully.
You can do the following by using an automated solution to scale your direct mail campaigns.
- Use your CRM data to personalize your messaging.
- Grow campaigns quickly so that you get better ROI, faster.
- Run A/B tests to improve your messaging when needed.
- Create look-alike campaigns.
Scaling allows you to create performance improvement systems that run on autopilot. For instance, you can target new audiences in new cities whenever you want to branch out. You can run optimizations related to messaging, CTAs, and discounts based on that area. You can also build the graphics around popular topics in that area. Scaling allows you to make easy changes when you need to switch up your campaign details.
Direct Mail Scaling with Valtim
Bring in an expert when it’s time to scale. Partnering with Valtim helps you build out your direct mail program and scale it for success. Valtim specializes in high-volume printing. We can provide your organization with batches of 5,000 pieces or more. In addition to scaling your direct mail campaign, we can help your organization with sanity checks, mailing lists, and campaign testing.
Contact Valtim to get started with your next direct mail scaling project.
