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Every marketing method that is widely used has some advantages and disadvantages. You can target your online ads very well to people with specific interests.
Same can still apply to print advertising in some specialised magazines.
Outdoor advertising when done right can be a good source of mind share, the same applies to online influencer marketing.
We are specialists in direct mail marketing based in London. As such we are going to have a look at the specific advantages of using direct mailing services for local advertising.
- 1. What do we mean by direct mail marketing?
- 2. Addressed mail or not?
- 3. Deal with real people
- 4. Direct mail targets homes
- 5. Direct mail reaches everyone
- 6. You can target council properties
- 7. Direct mail advertising to businesses
- 8. Combine direct mail and online advertising
What do we mean by direct mail marketing?
Direct mail marketing is an advertising method where you deliver pamphlets to addresses in areas you have carefully pre-selected.
You can pick these areas based on demographics and how close geographically they are to the location of your business.
You can target businesses, home addresses and even local authority housing with direct mail marketing. The exact targets will depend on the services or products you are offering and you need to discuss the selection with your mailing company of choice.
Addressed mail or not?
Direct mail can either be addressed or unaddressed. Depending on how you approach the process, addressed mail can have a higher open rate.
On the other hand unaddressed mail is considerably cheaper (up to 95% cheaper) to develiver and poses considerably fewer logistical challenges.
At The Private Postman we tend to recommend unaddressed mail to all our clients. The savings are so large that you can deliver almost ten times the amount of unaddressed direct mail at the same price compared to addressed mail.
There is no need to deal with envelopes, sourcing the registers of locals and we can conduct the deliveries efficiently. The amount of work that one has to do before deliveries even start for addressed direct mail campaigns is huge.
Your unaddressed leaflets can also immediately show your branding and design at a first glance. You do not want to be hiding your well designed pamphlets in an envelope.
Deal with real people
Direct mail marketing is all about proper planning and careful deliberation before deliveries start. You need to talk to your direct mailing company of choice directly before you make an order.
Finding out what your pamphlet should look like, which photos you should use on the front page, which areas you should select to target, how many pamphlets you should print.
You need to make all of these decisions with your overall goal in mind. You can do this only by talking to real experts in a real company.
If there is no one available to talk to you at a company you are hoping to work with you know that you need to move on. Direct mail marketing companies need to supply you with experts that can help you plan your campaigns and that can explain to you which decisions you should be making.
If you are planning a direct mail campaign in the UK you need to talk to real people.
Direct mail targets homes
If you are looking at mailing services targeted at home addresses you can guarantee that all of your advertising budget is spent delivering to real people.
A good mailing company should have a high quality proprietary mapping system available. This means if your company has done their job all addresses that do not fit the descriptor of “privately owned residential addresses” should be excluded from your campaigns.
They can do this only if they have put a lot of thought into designing their systems. If your focus is on residential addresses you will ignore all businesses, industrial addresses and local authority housing.
This means that if your mailing company runs a good system all of your pamphlets will make their way only to real people in real households. A bad mapping system that doesn’t allow for careful exclusion of the above mentioned addresses would result in wasted pamphlets.
You can prevent this from happening if you carefully vet the mailing company you are selecting and make sure that their mapping system is up to scratch.
Direct mail reaches everyone
One of the most obvious advantages of direct mail marketing that we discuss often is the fact that you can truly reach every single household in your area.
If your main goal is to reach every single household in your local area direct mail marketing is the best way to do this. You can make sure that there is no demographic skew in your selection. You can reach every household no matter the age or economic status of the residents.
This is something that is simply not possible by any other marketing method. The value of being able to do this becomes obvious if you think about advertising the opening of a new local London restaurant
You can target council properties
At The Private Postman we’ve pioneered various delivery techniques that are now commonly used by most other UK mailing companies. This includes various tracking methodologies and delivery standards.
One of the more recent innovations that not many other companies offer is the ability to use direct mail marketing to target council properties.
Providing mailing services to council properties has historically been a very complicated procedure. It has been so difficult that most mailing companies now completely exclude council properties from their system.
At The Private Postman we exclude council properties from our standard door drop campaigns. However we offer council property deliveries as a separate service.
This is due to specific challenges around gaining access to local authority housing, mapping of large estates and more.
We’ve negotiated good terms with most London councils and we can now offer direct mail marketing options for local authority housing. Options for solus and shared direct mail campaigns are available.
The ability to target council properties only is something unique to direct mail and something no other marketing method can offer.
Direct mail advertising to businesses
Similar to council deliveries, b2b direct mail marketing is also possible but must be done separately.
B2B mailing campaigns bring different challenges to targeting council or residential addresses.
Businesses tend to be clustered in small areas with large distances between each cluster. This is true all over the UK and even in London.
As such the travel time required to deliver to a 1,000 business addresses is considerably higher than running a mailing service targeting a 1,000 residential addresses.
As such the cost structure is different for B2B mailing services and these campaigns require more planning.
With that said B2B campaigns can be very effective. Reaching businesses directly in this way is almost impossible through other methods.
Combine direct mail and online advertising
One of the great things about direct mail advertising is the fact that it can very nicely synergise with other marketing methods.
You can canvas your local area with flyers and follow up with a facebook ad campaign focusing on the same part of your town.
This way you can create a great amount of exposure to your brand in specific areas that are relevant to your business.
You can also use direct mail advertising to drive traffic to your online profiles. Trade specific apps and services can be difficult to advertise on.
Using pamphlets however you can send your local clients to your app profiles with a QR code. You can do this whether you are a restaurant on a food delivery app or an estate agent on a property app.
