According to one recent study, the average household in the United States gets about six pieces of junk mail every single day. In fact, every five days we collectively produce enough junk mail to literally reach the moon. Junk mail as a concept doesn’t just damage the environment (roughly one billion pounds wind up in landfills each year, after all) – it also damages the legitimate direct mail marketing efforts that companies like you are engaged in every single day.
Shattering The Myth of “Junk” Mail
One of the most critical things for you to understand about junk mail is that it is NOT a term used to describe any and all marketing collateral that someone happens to get when they open their mailbox in the afternoon. Instead, junk mail describes IRRELEVANT mail that someone happens to receive. A flyer for a product they’re not interested in. A brochure for a business they’re never going to visit. A coupon that they can’t use and couldn’t care less about.
So how do you keep your mail from falling into the catch-all category of “junk” mail? It’s simple – you make sure that it is as relevant as it can possibly be for the people that you’re actually trying to communicate with.
This is one of the major reasons why a targeted mailing list is so important – it can help you separate your audience down into smaller chunks based on things like demographics or interests, allowing you to tailor your content towards a much narrower focus than before. This lets you identify niche topics that are relevant to your audience members and also gives you the opportunity to get much more specific than you could if you were treating every customer equally.
Tracking and analytics solutions will also become invaluable tools during this time. By using direct marketing performance tracking techniques to take a granular look at how your collateral is performing, you can see more than just what works and what doesn’t – you can see which topics and approaches people are responding to and which ones they aren’t. This gives you an opportunity to go even DEEPER, increasing the overall level of relevancy for your campaign as much as possible.
In the end, it’s important to understand that with the right approach, ANY direct mail that you send can rise above the moniker of “junk mail” – both for now and for all time. By making an effort to build the right direct marketing lists to meet both your needs and the needs of your audience, you can create better, more focused and more personal content across the board. At that point, solutions like DynamiScan allow even something as seemingly straightforward as direct mail postcards become something far greater than just a branded plastic postcard mailer – they become a true engine for the higher ROI (return on investment) that you’ve been waiting for.
If you’d like to find out more information about how direct mail marketing companies can help you create better and more valuable content, don’t delay – contact us today.