This is part one in a two-part series. You can read part two here.
Mail services are vital to small businesses and can increase customer involvement for those who haven’t tried them yet.
Although direct email campaigns can be effective ways to create a buzz, spam filtering can be a problem. According to Kaspersky Lab’s SecureList, 56.17 percent of the emails sent in the third quarter of 2015 were considered spam. When this much spam is still bombarding your customer base, it’s difficult to get your message through. Luckily, direct mail continues to hits its mark and costs surprisingly little.
How Mail Services Can Help Your Business
It’s one thing to plan a direct mail marketing effort and quite another to actually implement it.
Business owners are busy people, their places of business sometimes chaotic. The manpower and effort it takes to print documents, address them, apply postage and mail them out can be oppressive in the face of so many other things that need doing right away. Without direct mail, though, many businesses are missing out on real opportunities for growth. That’s why 3rd party logistics firms like ShipWizard offer printing and mail fulfillment services.
Outsourcing your mail campaigns can be a huge help to your business in a myriad of ways, including:
Saving you time. You want to do everything you can to expand your business’s reach, but direct mail campaigns can cost you time that you simply can’t afford while your business is still small. Instead of spreading yourself even thinner, hiring a company to handle these types of mail services can increase your bottom line while allowing you to focus on what it is that you do best.
Generating new business. Existing customers are great, but without new customers your business growth will be severely stunted. After all, your current customers can only buy so many products before they’ve purchased everything they need. Direct mail can mean significant growth for your company, provided you know who to target and where to reach them. Your mail services partner already has established databases of sorted customers who will often be receptive to your marketing.
Increasing awareness of new products or offers. When you have a new product or a great offer, your existing customers want to know about it right away. Although email will work for some, many others may be distrustful of electronic offers and want to see them in print. Direct mail works great to satisfy this need.
The Harvard Business Review profiled a case study of a large retailer’s experience with direct mail versus electronic offers. In it, HBR found that direct mail received a 24 percent return rate from existing customers, whose average order value was $68.62. Email alone in this same group returned only 23 percent of the time, with a value of $67.82. That might not sound like much, but there were 35,000 pieces of mail involved in this case study — that means that direct mail earned the company $30,457 more than email!
Mail services aren’t right for every business, but every business that needs mail services needs someone who can do them right. If you lack the internal talent to put mailing campaigns together in a timely manner, it’s a good idea to consult with a 3rd party logistics firm about mail services to make the most of your marketing dollars.
Find out more about what mail services can do for you in part two of this two-part series.
