How to Follow Up on Direct Mail Ads: A Complete Guide

To really be successful with your campaigns, you really should follow up on your direct mail advertising.

Direct mail is a marketing strategy in which companies and organizations mail marketing materials to consumers and businesses.

These campaigns use a variety of formats, such as letters, brochures, folded self-mailers, and postcards. They target customers based on segmented and personalized data, such as purchasing behavior, demographic information, or other important criteria.

But to increase your chances for meeting your marketing goals, you should follow up an initial effort with another direct mail campaign or other channels. Depending on your audience and budget, among other factors, that follow-up (or additional ones) might be the one that gets your prospect to act on your message or offer.

In this post, I’m going to look at how to plan for a direct mail follow-up campaign, including how to optimize your response the second time around, incorporate other channels, and avoid mistakes along the way.

Not every campaign achieves enormous success with a single campaign. Marketers and fundraisers understand that how you follow up on direct mail plays an important role in increasing both your response rates and ROI, among other metrics.

But finding the right course of action depends on more than budget, deadlines, or other factors. It also depends on your target audience’s receptiveness as individuals to your message or offer. Each may be situated in a different place in the buyer journey/sales funnel. A single approach is unlikely to move every single one equally.

With multi-touch marketing, you can reach customers in a variety of formats and channels. This approach lets your customers meet you when and where they are most comfortable and ready to make a purchase. Your brand is top of mind after several impressions, building a deeper connection to your audience. And after they buy, you have the opportunity to build on that trust and earn their loyalty.

The right follow-up strategy can improve your results and KPIs. How much a follow-up mailing succeeds is difficult to say broadly because it depends on many factors. However, this much is certain: a single mail piece mailed once counts for one impression (unless it gets passed along). The frequency of exposure to your message or offer affects how the audience responds, especially as it becomes more familiar with your product or service.

As with any campaign, you should follow up on direct mail by first taking several steps to make sure that your efforts will result in greater success in meeting your goals the next time around.

To judge the effectiveness of your campaigns, you need to look at your average direct mail response rate. Remember: to calculate it, divide the total count of responses by the number of pieces mailed, then multiply by 100.

Several approaches can help you measure the direct mail response performance of your mail campaign, such as unique offer codes, PURLs, QR codes, phone calls, and in-person visits and scans.

Attribution of a mail campaign helps you understand when, how, and where your target market chooses to engage with you. Based on where you see your audience on additional campaigns, you can set up a comparison of the follow-up methods to determine which ones work best in achieving success.

Who is your audience, and are you sure about that?

Take a look at what recipients responded (or didn’t) to your initial mailing. Categorize them based on these important segmentation factors:

Targeting the segments with the most potential first will generate returns that you can invest back into the marketing budget to apply to other segments.

In addition, leverage those data to create personalized offers and touchpoints, as well as headlines, subject lines, images, graphics, etc. that are more likely to be relevant to their wants and needs. With variable data printing (VDP), follow-up mail pieces will be more likely to grab their attention.

When planning a follow-up campaign, your choice of channels may dictate how successful your effort will be. Each brings specific strengths that are important in increasing the reach of your message. And depending on that message and your target segments, those channels may be the right ones that convert prospects.

Here are some of the options available, each with their own advantages depending on the audience being targeted:

After an initial mail campaign, develop a data-driven strategy that maximizes the success of your follow-up campaign.

If you track your initial mail campaign with USPS Informed Visibility or other delivery tools, you can set a threshold for response before going ahead with any follow-up. You should follow up on direct mail by setting up a timeline. Depending on the channel you use, those messages can be sent as soon as a few days after your mail piece’s drop date. 

The number and frequency of your follow-up outreach depends on factors like audience, budget, content of your messages, and your campaign goals. Once started, though, keep your cadence consistent and structured.

Regardless of the channel, moving a prospect to convert means continually engaging them with your company and message. At least in the first few efforts, refer to the original direct mail piece, then build from there.  

Some ideas for developing effective messaging:

Reaching out to prospects with a follow up on direct mail can cross several channels at the same time. This approach builds trust in your brand as well as multiple impressions of your message or offer.

For example, an email campaign can target leads who supplied their own data on a landing page resulting from a scan of a mailer’s QR code. Or an SMS effort sent to callers to a toll-free number on a mail piece.

There are other channels that you should include in your marketing strategy to follow up on direct mail.

Email is an especially useful tool because it works so well over time to increase engagement and drive leads. It works best when triggered by a customer taking a specific action, like responding to a direct mail campaign.

With an email drip campaign, the delivery of several emails over a set interval is automated, with each event or prompt setting up another email. Set an overall goal (the action you want the target audience to take), the number of emails in your sequence, and what KPIs you’ll need to monitor to determine success. To optimize your open rates, include relevant personalized touchpoints in the drip sequence.

Follow-up phone calls are an important factor in a well-executed lead generation program that starts with direct mail.

To maximize the effectiveness of this personal tactic, wait a specific period of time (a week, 10 days, etc.) before reaching out with a call. Keep your message short and light. For example: “Hello! I wanted to see if you received the jumbo postcard that we sent you last week. If you have a moment, I’d love to talk about our special offer.”

A good voicemail message should be brief, again, emphasizing the previous direct mail effort, and its offer or message and providing a contact number for callback.

Social media channels provide potential engagement value to a target audience. So be sure to analyze the data on how your audience connects with you on social media to get a fuller understanding of their demographics, interests, and behavior. You can also use insights from these channels to see what content your audience is likely to interact with, what posts have the best engagement, and from there, apply those learnings to mail or another channel. 

Some prospects may not be comfortable speaking on the phone, so try reaching out with an SMS marketing campaign. Texts can be more concise (2-4 sentences) while still conversational and friendly. Reference any previous interaction on another channel, including mail, and make the call-to-action clear.

Direct mail is no longer a silo. It depends on data to be a vital part of the multichannel marketing mix. With robust and accurate data as a foundation, you can market to customers and prospects across channels with the right message at the right time.

When integrated into omnichannel marketing, data-driven direct mail is an even more powerful tool in creating and deepening customer relationships. But to be more successful, you need to take several important steps to optimize your performance.

With your first direct mail campaign as your baseline, try one or more different variables to generate better performance. For a follow-up mail piece, that can be the format, size, headline, or offer.

With other channels, optimize by testing the right metrics, such as cadence, numbers of touches, content, or subject line does it take to get a response.

To attribute where the responses come from, track them with these methods:

Your goals or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) may change from one campaign or channel to the next. First, look at all of your metrics. Then, based on the data, decide which ones are most important, such as:

You need the most accurate data to drive engagement and have the most valid results. Remember to:

When you follow up an initial mailpiece with mail or another channel, the results you get will point the way for further actions to take. As already noted, attribution, testing, and analysis are important to include in your decisions.

However, other obstacles may stand in the way of achieving the results you want with your campaign.

Your brand image represents what you have to sell. You must maintain consistent messaging across all channels to build trust in prospects. At the same time, be sure to tailor your message for that format if necessary.

Remember the marketing “Rule of 7”: A prospect needs to see or hear your message seven times before acting. While persistence is important, understand that some prospects and customers may not respond to repeated attempts. To avoid over-communicating, use testing and analyze your results to develop a plan with the right frequency for your additional efforts.

Audiences today live across channels on multiple devices as well as mail. An audience-focused approach uses big data, and now, AI as well to target individuals based on what channels they use.

Raising your direct mail response rate usually doesn’t come easily or suddenly. Rather, it’s the result of many smaller moves along the way. How should you follow up on direct mail? With adjustments that incorporate more precise planning, a closer analysis of results, and a commitment to apply learnings from that first mail effort to additional campaigns in mail and other channels. Exactly where your customers and prospects will see them, trust them, and act on them.

At mailing.com, we have years of experience working on complex campaigns using direct mail. Together with our data and mailing teams, we can help you put together a complete and cost-effective direct mail campaign to meet (and exceed) your goals.

Call or reach out to us to find out more!