Design Tips & Tricks: Design a direct mail piece

We have talked about Direct Mail no doubt wetted your appetite for it, now come the question on how to design material to make the best use of it. What may surprise you is that setting up a piece of direct mail is no more complex than creating a generic letter or flyer. All it takes is knowing the key steps to make it a easy to understand and simple to follow process.

Use Direct Response principles

Direct Mail is not cheap.  So make sure that you are making the most of your spend.  ALWAYS follow the AIDA principles:

• Attention
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Make sure that you match the piece to the selected audience – so focus on the customer’s needs first!  Include a great headline, and offer and an obvious call to action.

Choose the right size and format

Anything printed can be a direct mail item, from as big as an A0 plan to as small as an A6 postcard. It doesn’t just have to be a flat sheet of paper or card: you can print brochures, booklets, calendars, voucher books and many other things. The only limitation is what you want it to do and how big your budget is.  You can even do custom shaped items for that extra attention!
But choosing the right size and format is more than just a budget issue. Your choice of size and format should be suitable to the audience and offer.  It should allow your story to unfold well and should lead your audience to your offer and call to action naturally.  It should also be sufficient to grab attention and compel people to read further.  There is no right answer here – it all depends.

Allow plenty of time

This is where planning your advertising campaign well advance is an advantage. It takes time to collect the data you need, design the direct mail pieces, test it, then finally produce and send it out. If you are just sending a letter to existing clients then it can be done in a fairly short time. If you are wanting to make use of an independent mailing list from a specialist company, then it can take much longer as you refine and process the data they supply to more closely match your needs. If you are wanting to make use of the cost saving of Permit Post mailing, then it pays to allow for review and fixing of mailing addresses as well.

Personalise the piece

Before you do anything else you need to chose how you want to personalise the material. The key to make the piece to be more effective is by including more personalised information in it. Taking a letter as an example, you would normally included the target’s name, contact information, and a personal greeting. What you could also include is their name throughout the letter, state what product or service they took from you and how long ago it was. For the really advanced formats you could even generate an offer for them based on their buying history. It’s not limited to just text either, with a little planning we can dynamically integrate pictures in to any printing job.  All of this information can be right at your fingertips in your accounts and records, all it take is a little imagination.

What if you want to contact new possible customers but you don’t know how? There are several companies that specialise in compiling mailing lists from public and private data. The cost depend on how big a list, the amount of data per record, and the nature of data wanted. Having already prepared the groundwork for the data you need, this allows you to order the only the information you need to make the direct mail work.

It doesn’t matter where the data is being sourced from: accounting program, database, spreadsheet, physical records, or from an independent company,  what it needs to be in is an electronic file that the print systems can read to generate the finished pieces. We recommend using a spreadsheet as that is the simplest to use and manage; each row is one customer, each column is one bit of information. This makes it easy to sort and prepare the data for merging to the finished piece. Also look at segmenting your data into more manageable blocks. You may find that you want to send out different offers to different people, or might want to target different areas at different times based on the nature of your business. You might simply want to trial it with a smaller test group before committing to the full run. This is where the the smaller volume fast turnaround systems of Copy Express work really well as we can print as few or as many as you need.

Setting up the design

Having done everything from personalised letters to dynamically generated books, I’ve found that  the design process for direct mail requires only a little extra planning compared to a generic item. If you have collected the right information then the design only needs to be flexible to allow for content to flow as it changes. If you have created mail merged letters and labels, then the process for setting more complex items works the same way.

Text is simple enough, you only have to allow some extra space for the flowing as the content changes. Pictures require a bit of preprocessing to make sure they are all a consistent size and proportions when they are integrated into the piece. If you already have Office then you already have the tools needed to manage photos. If you bring it to us at the beginning of the process, we can guide you through each step of the way so that all makes sense and you get exactly what you want. If you a more hands off approach, then we can do it all for you at a competitive price.

Test, test, and test again

This is the most important stage. Test everything. There’s nothing worse than to create your direct mail piece and find out that you have part of the text cut off because it didn’t’ reflow correctly. We recommend that you create some ‘worse case’ test records as part of the spreadsheet to check that the design can’t break. Also include some ‘bad records’ so to have some incomplete records in your sheet to ensure when you print them the pieces will still work correctly. This is where working with us at Copy Express is an advantage as we can do test runs on demand to test every probability and to ensure that it looks great when the target gets the finished piece. Having a second set of eyes never hurts as often they will instantly spot problems you have become ‘blind’ to.
Once you are happy with the piece, do a proper test run and send a few units to yourself and other people so you can get feedback on how effective it its. It’s also a good way to test how well it will survive your preferred method of delivery. It’s a good investment to do that final test before you go to the expense of committing to the full run.
That’s the basics of designing for direct mail. The key to all of it working is preparations, the more you invest the more effective it will be. When you are ready to create your own piece of direct mail, contact us here at Copy Express to give you all the assistance you need to make a easy simple process.