These days when people think of direct marketing to schools, they think of email. Direct mail – that is mailing via the post – is seen as old fashioned and hopelessly expensive.
And yet…
Direct mail is making a comeback.
This is happening for several reasons, and here are a couple that you might like to consider:
1: The volume of direct mail being received both by schools is dramatically down. It is now around 20% of what it was five years ago. So, as teachers receive less direct mail, the chances of each piece being read is much greater than it ever was. Indeed while administrators previously had difficulty passing all the direct mail on to teachers, now it is not a problem at all.
2: Direct mail is uniquely placed for experimentation. Because most campaigns are looking for a response rate of around 2% or 3%, it is quite possible to test the campaign by mailing out 250 items, to see what happens. The cost of this is usually around £120 – which is far less than the average email campaign.
3: Direct mail gets much higher response rates that email. So if we look at the £120 spent on a direct mail test run, we might well find that we get our needed response rate, and then can roll the campaign out to the full mailing list of say 5,000 or more, thus making a far greater profit than can be made through an email campaign. Even when the trial doesn’t work, it is more than likely to get some response, so the actual loss goes down to £40 or £50 – and it is quite possible to try the experiment again.
4: While we now have many email lists which contain teachers personal email addresses, these lists are not, and never will be complete. With direct mail however it is possible to reach all the schools.
5: On a cost analysis it is generally the case the direct mail gives a better return on investment than email. Not always, but quite often.
If you have left direct mail behind, or it is no longer central to your way of thinking about marketing, you might like to revisit it. One way to do this is through the article, “The 5 Ways of Doubling Direct Mail Response Rates by Being Different”. It is free, and it is at…
If you want to talk about any of this, do call Hamilton House on 01536 399 000.