Four of the most important things to consider when sending a direct mail piece

Tweet Here at AccuLink, our clients rely on the expertise of our outstanding MPQC certified mailing department to make sure we meet or exceed their expectations of success of their mail campaigns. In order to do that, certain “rules” must be followed. Doug Mewborn, head of our Mailing Department offers these important tips:

1. Message needs to be catchy, clear and concise to draw the recipient’s attention. All mail is faced in the same direction when placed in mailboxes by the postman. Therefore, a person taking mail from their mailbox always looks at the address side of the mail. If it is a bill or something that is of interest, they put it in a pile. If it is “solicitation mail” they may or may not keep it. One major key in encouraging a person to at least turn it over to see the pretty picture (which many people insist on using on the back side of a direct mail piece) is to have a catchy marketing phrase or tag line on the front address side of sufficient size, color, content to catch the attention of the recipient. This tag line must register with the recipient within 1-2 seconds or the piece will probably get tossed in the garbage with its message on the back or inside gone forever.


2. Size of a marketing piece matters. Most mail is either a #10 size envelope or smaller. If a marketing piece is made larger (such as 6" tall by 11.5" wide, which will not increase postage on standard mail) then this piece will stick up and out from the stack of mail coming out of the mailbox. This improves the chance of being seen.
   
3. Timing of a marketing piece matters. I’ve always felt the best day to have a piece in a recipients mailbox is Tuesday. This is usually the slowest mail day of the week. This improves the chance of being seen. Tuesday delivery is sometimes hard to accomplish, however. DDU mail drops along with “requested delivery dates” on the mail bundles often helps accomplish this.


4. Official looking mail is out. Preparing marketing mail to appear to be an “official” type of mailing went out with the hula hoop. Rather than pretend the piece is something it is not, just be up front – sell what you have – not Savings Bonds.

Good Practices in Email Marketing Series Part 3

Tweet

Today we bring you part three of a four-part series highlighting tips for successful email marketing.

5 Not obvious ways to improve your email campaign

Just about everyone knows the basics of improving the effectiveness of an email campaign: keep your lists clean, make the content relevant, segment your file. But in its white paper “20 Quick Tips for Improving Your Email Programs¹,” email services provider StrongMail Systems offers some often-overlooked suggestions as well:

· Know your SNDS rating. SNDS stands for Smart Network Data Services, and according to StrongMail it’s “the Windows Live Postmaster Group’s method for reviewing your IP address(es). Microsoft has introduced the SNDS rating system as a way to fight spam, viruses and other email abuse… Microsoft provides ISPs with mail traffic data from all the domains hosted by Windows Live Mail and Hotmail. The ISPs in turn use that data to help prevent spam from being sent from their IP addresses.”

· Test your template code. “Program your email templates and test them through a rendering tool at the onset of the template introduction,” StrongMail advises. “Keep master copies of these separate from the ones reused in every mailing to avoid code corruption.” StrongMail also suggests avoiding XHTML.

· Determine your top domains and throttle accordingly. “Throttling” email is a matter of making sure you do not exceed an ISP’s limits regarding inbound mail volume or speed. Exceeding those limits can hurt your email deliverability. To ensure that you don’t, make a list of the domains that receive the bulk of your email messages, then check each one’s policies on inbound deliveries and if necessary modify your delivery rules.

· Link into feedback loops. A feedback loop (FBL) is an ISP’s report to an email sender of recipients who are reporting the sender’s messages as spam. You need to know about these complaints so that you can prove to the ISP that you are not a spammer before it blacklists you in response to the complaints. Various ISPs use different FBLs, so you need to visit the postmaster sites of each to sign up to receive the reports.

· Accommodate recipients who use handheld devices. “More and more people are using handheld devices to access their email, and for those users, it can be an aggravating experience thumb-scrolling through dozens of HTML links before they ever see your first image or text block related to the message content,” StrongMail reports. It offers two ways to accommodate these recipients, though “in either case, you will need to include language at the top of the message and a link to encourage them to click through”: 


1. Program a text message in the text window of your campaign management application. Use the recipient agent data to determine what browser was used to open the message, then flag that recipient record as a handheld user and always send that recipient text.

2. Host the HTML version of your message and ask handheld users to click to view the HTML.

¹Published: 15th April 2008
Article Link

********************************

Tune in Thursday, January 28 for Part 4: Seven tips for improving your email design.