5 Tips for Outstanding Direct Mail Design



With any direct mail piece, the goal is to entice people to respond to your offer. But with great direct mail pieces, you can hook them before they even get to the offer. Engage people’s curiosity from the moment the mail piece gets into their hands. Here are seven tips for capturing readers at the outset: 

1 Use the upper right-hand corner.
This is a tip lifted from the playbook of highly effective catalogers. The upper right-hand corner is where our eyes go first.  Then our eyes proceed along the top of the page, then continue down to the rest. Use the upper right-hand corner to place teaser copy or compelling data such as “99% customer satisfaction rate!”

2 KEEP IT CLEAN.
When the layout is cluttered, it’s hard for people to focus on any one thing. Use white space to draw the eye and make information easy to absorb. Instead of heavy blocks of text, consider using bulleted or numbered lists. 

3 TAP INTO BRAIN SCIENCE.
The following techniques use brain science to capture attention and engage
your audience:

The Zeigarnik Effect is when information is left unfinished. Leave people hanging and they feel compelled to open the envelope, turn over the postcard, or click through a link to find out the rest. 

The Van Restorff Effect is the use of content that is out of place to capture attention. Old Spice used this to great effect with its “Smell Like a Man” commercials.


The Noble Edge Effect taps people’s desire to be associated with positive social or environmental causes.

4 USE TESTIMONIALS.
People trust other shoppers more than marketers, so use customer testimonials to let other buyers promote your product. Use QR Codes or AR to bring those endorsements to life by taking shoppers direct to mobile video. 

5 CREATE A COMPELLING CALL TO ACTION (CTA).
How many direct mail pieces have unfulfilled potential because someone forgot to include a call to action? Don’t assume readers will automatically know what you want them to do. Add urgency or additional value by giving a deadline, providing an extra discount for early response, or providing some other motivator to encourage people to respond right away. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3 Powerful Tricks to Learn New Skills Faster

Image
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy Though few people like it, change never stops. Success in life requires the ability to adapt. As one Chinese proverb quips, “the wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher.” Whether you enjoy change or not, the pace of change marches ahead at an ever-increasing pace. Here is a statistical snapshot of what that looks like: 94% of the internet workload will be processed on the cloud by the end of 2021 It is estimated that 70% of all automobiles will be connected to the internet through the Internet of Things by 2023 By 2030, the fully and semi-automatic car market will be worth $26 billion Artificial Intelligence is slated to replace around 85 million US jobs by 2025 The world has produced 90% of its Big Data (or extensive data sets) in the past two years Does that feel overwhelming? It can be. But humans
Read more

6 Winning Direct Mail Campaigns

Image
Direct mail offers results that other channels just can't match. According to a recent study, direct mail has a response rate as high as 9% . However, there are always ways to engage your audience better and improve your mailers' effectiveness. These methods below catch your recipents' attention and increase the chances that they'll read and respond to your direct mail piece.  6 Winning Direct Mail Campaigns 1. Instill Curiosity with a Quiz Do you worry your direct mail envelopes are going in the trash unread? Take a page from Harvard Medical School's playbook. In a recent mailing to woo subscribers for their Harvard Heart Letter newsletter, they put a heart health quiz on the front. The answers to the three-question quiz were inside the mailer, giving recipients a reason to open. 2. Benefits, Not Features As marketers, it's so easy to get caught up in promoting all the neat features of your product. Your readers, however, don't care about th
Read more

Affordable Offline Marketing for Your Small Business

Image
Do you have a small business that could use a revenue boost? Most marketing strategies are crafted around costly advertising campaigns, but there are many free or affordable tactics you can use to grow your business at any stage. Here are a few offline marketing fundamentals to get you started, no matter how small your budget! 1. Take part in local events. Sales are based on relationships, and relationships require connection. Network in proactive ways by attending or taking part in local events. Get to know other small business owners and have your business card or flyer ready; you never know when the opportunity will present itself! 2. Create customized stickers or labels. It's not just a kid thing – people truly enjoy stickers! Create a colorful custom sticker and pass them out anywhere your target users might be. Stickers and labels can be used on car windows, water bottles, notebooks, and more. 3. Start a simple rewards system. One of th
Read more