2 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Doing Direct Mail

How much do you know about direct mail? Well if you were like me, you know nothing. You've even considered mailing out to everyone in your local area, hoping that someone would respond to your offer. But this probably failed too. A lot of people who get into direct mail find themselves having to go through a learning curve in order to make it more profitable for you.

So how do you do direct mail? Well it's simple: Find a list from the SRDS, mail out to this list once, measure the response, and if it's profitable, run the campaign over and over again. This is direct mail in a nutshell, but most business owners don't want to do this "laborious" procedure, so they stick with some thing else that may work: Poor direct mail.

What do I mean when I say poor direct mail, I mean business owners aren't taking the chance of using all of options at their disposal, and instead, they go down a path that has been proven to be unprofitable - no matter how easy it sounds. In fact, let's take a look at some of the poor choices that a lot of direct mail marketers make.

1) Not selecting a good list

Either business owners get the list from a list broker, or they try to use the SRDS to get leads. No matter what options they choose, they somehow always wind up choosing a poor list to mail to. At least if you're going to acquire a list, make sure it's based out in Texas or California.

When you select a poor list, your campaign is done from the start. To make sales, you need to have a list that will produce right away. To help, consider picking a more specific list to mail to. This will cost you more money to buy, but if your offer suggests that this is something that you should buy, then go with it. Sometimes paying high prices for a list means that you will improve the chances of having huge success with marketing campaign.

Here's another reason why direct mail isn't profitable for you:

2) Your offer and sales letter isn't in-sync

If your sales letter and offer isn't relevant to the list you're mailing out to, then part of your marketing process is doomed from the start. You have to make sure that your offer is something unique in the marketplace, and make sure your sales letter is long enough to close your readers on the sale.

To write a good offer and sales letter, you will need something called a "swipe file". A swipe file is a collection of winning ads and sales letters that you can use to make your business a success. With a swipe file, you'll have a ton of inspiration at your disposal to come up with new copy that sells.

Both of these tips for making direct mail work are essential to your success. If you don't know how to make direct mail work, then now is a great time to learn about doing so - because it can really make you profitable in a short period of time. So consider using these tips to have the kind of success that you dream of.