Can using a mailing company really improve your direct mail ROI? One thing small business owners tend to overlook is that your time is worth money – a lot of it. If you’re “saving money” creating your own direct mail, you need to factor in your time to calculate the true return on your investment.
Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean that’s the best use of your time. Or your employees’ time, if you have them. As vital as marketing is to the growth and prosperity of your business or organization, it’s not your primary mission – the reason you exist. So every minute you spend on non-primary activities takes you away from building your business.
Delegating important but non-critical work to an outside expert enables you to stay focused. Allowing a mailing company to handle the details of your direct mail projects is a perfect example.
In addition to regaining your focus, a full-service mailing company brings invaluable additional expertise to your projects. When you try to handle every project yourself, you not only spend time on the various tasks involved, you have to learn what is needed to do the job. You cannot possibly hope to become an expert on everything you need to do. Functioning with less-than-optimum expertise means your direct mail efforts will be less-than-ideal, in turn reducing your ultimate ROI.
A mailing company can create better-looking, more effective mailers.
They have talented designers on staff who specialize in direct mail pieces, including postcards. With their experience, they know what works and what does not, so they can produce postcards for your marketing campaigns that speak directly to your top prospects in a way that generates maximum response. Better quality production and better-targeted messaging delivers better results – not just response, but more revenue to improve the return on your investment.
They can do the work faster.
The sooner your marketing gets into the hands of prospects, the sooner you can start building your clientele and banking new income. This is another way in which time is a factor in determining return on investment.
You can save money as well as time.
Postal regulations can be somewhat confusing, so it’s easy to make mistakes that result in paying a higher postage rate. That simply eats away at your return. Professionals consider every detail – the size of your postcard, the scope of your mailing list, the way your mailing is prepared, etc. – to ensure you pay the lowest postage rate available. The less you spend, the higher the return on your investment will be.
They know mailing list development inside and out.
It’s an enormous waste of time and effort and money to produce and send direct mail to the wrong people. In order to assure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck, you want to use a mailing list composed of top prospects – people who are highly likely to want or need your products or services. If you’re promoting a special to past customers, you know your list has the right people on it. But if you’re prospecting for new business, you need expert help to pinpoint the most valuable selection criteria to build your list.
They can set you up with phone call tracking.
Tracking allows you to gather more useful data about phone response to your direct mail campaigns so you can compute ROI more accurately. You can also record and study calls to identify ways to increase conversions. More conversions means more revenue, of course, once again boosting your ultimate ROI. You can calculate the biggest boost of all by computing what each of those new customers means to your business in terms of lifetime value – how much they are likely to spend over the years.
Learn more about measuring postcard marketing & their ROI.
It all adds up. Isn’t it time you started using a mailing company instead of sending your own?