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Casual Articles - Direct Mail Response Rates Mislead if You are Careless
1. Mail to a different list Your list is the most important part of your direct mail campaign. Who you mail to is more important than what you mail. So if you are persuaded that your offer is attractive, your creative is compelling and your timing is spot on, mail to a different group of people and see what happens2. Change your offer
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because h
Marketing online and offline couldn’t be more complex and competitive than it is today. Markets have fragmented and advertising mediums have splintered into hundreds of specialized niches, all requiring specialized expertise in order to achieve respectable results. Marketing channels too, are splintered and controlled by conglomerates. It’s a realm that is often beyond the averag
Direct mail response rates only tell you part of what you need to know. They tell you the percentage of people on your list who responded. That’s it. They don’t tell you if you broke even. If you made a profit. Or if the sales people who followed up on the leads closed any sales.
Response rates are misleading if you read them incorrectly. For example, I recently wrote a fundraising package for a North American nonprofit. The letter, mailed to a list of 6,850 donors, generated 35 gifts (responses). Run the numbers and that’s a response rate of half of one percent, a dismal result. But this number is misleading because my client (against my recommendation), mailed the letter to every donor in his database, including lapsed donors who had not made a donation for years.
So I asked my client how many active donors he had in his database. Two hundred, he replied. That’s 200 active donors out of a list of 6,850 total donors. Run the numbers again, and you’ll see that my letter generated a 17.5% response rate when mailed to active donors, or, to put it another way, when mailed to a good list.
Another problem with response rates, valid as they are, is that you cannot use them for every industry. Take the Olympic Games. When a nation applies to the International Olympic Committee, requesting that the Olympic Games be held in their capital city, they need a 100% response rate to succeed. They need one “client” to buy their proposal or their mailing has failed.
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because he
Back in the 1760s, the great Dr Samuel Johnson delivered himself of the dictum that ‘promise, large promise is the soul of advertising’. It’s a good thought, a great thought; and I contend that what was true then is equally true today. But it seems to me that modern advertisers are tying themselves into unnecessary knots in an attempt to reach audiences which they believe are bec
Response rates are misleading if you read them incorrectly. For example, I recently wrote a fundraising package for a North American nonprofit. The letter, mailed to a list of 6,850 donors, generated 35 gifts (responses). Run the numbers and that’s a response rate of half of one percent, a dismal result. But this number is misleading because my client (against my recommendation), mailed the letter to every donor in his database, including lapsed donors who had not made a donation for years.
So I asked my client how many active donors he had in his database. Two hundred, he replied. That’s 200 active donors out of a list of 6,850 total donors. Run the numbers again, and you’ll see that my letter generated a 17.5% response rate when mailed to active donors, or, to put it another way, when mailed to a good list.
Another problem with response rates, valid as they are, is that you cannot use them for every industry. Take the Olympic Games. When a nation applies to the International Olympic Committee, requesting that the Olympic Games be held in their capital city, they need a 100% response rate to succeed. They need one “client” to buy their proposal or their mailing has failed.
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because h
Do you use marketing language when someone asks you what you do? Do you sound like a brochure instead of a real, live human being? I'm sure you recognize marketing language in other people. Have you ever heard someone say something like “we help our clients find the solutions to their needs” or “we help our clients protect their wealth” or “we provide technology solutions for pro
So I asked my client how many active donors he had in his database. Two hundred, he replied. That’s 200 active donors out of a list of 6,850 total donors. Run the numbers again, and you’ll see that my letter generated a 17.5% response rate when mailed to active donors, or, to put it another way, when mailed to a good list.
Another problem with response rates, valid as they are, is that you cannot use them for every industry. Take the Olympic Games. When a nation applies to the International Olympic Committee, requesting that the Olympic Games be held in their capital city, they need a 100% response rate to succeed. They need one “client” to buy their proposal or their mailing has failed.
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because h
You may not quite know it, but the limited liability corporation (others also call it a limited liability company) has become the most popular form for organizing business and investment activities. There are many benefits to be derived from a limited liability corporation.For instance, if you are a doctor, lawyer or some other professional and you want to protect your ass
Another problem with response rates, valid as they are, is that you cannot use them for every industry. Take the Olympic Games. When a nation applies to the International Olympic Committee, requesting that the Olympic Games be held in their capital city, they need a 100% response rate to succeed. They need one “client” to buy their proposal or their mailing has failed.
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because h
You can make a lot of money in the truck driving industry today. Many experienced drivers make $80,000 or even more, but getting into the industry can be a bit difficult since a CDL, or commercial driver's license, is required.Right now there is a huge truck driver shortage in the USA. Trucking companies, for the first time ever, are trying to find creative ways to hire po
Take a magazine publisher. It mails to 500,000 names, generates only a 1% response rate, yet considers the mailing a success. But a stock broker who targets wealthy doctors in Lower Manhattan has different expectations. His lead generation letter needs to generate a response rate of at least 25% because he only mails it to 100 doctors, and he only closes around one in every 25 doctors who responds. A one percent response rate, even if it is an average, is of no use to him.
Average response rates are useful when they are for your product or service and your target audience in particular. If you can discover the response rates that your competitors are generating by mailing sales letters to the same prospects that you are targeting, then, by all means, use those response rates as a yardstick against which you compare your results. You are talking specifics.
Some response rates for various industries.
The Direct Marketing Association (www.the-dma.org) calculated the average response rates for a number of industries:
Fundraising: 5.35%
Retail: 3.36%
Businesses selling services to businesses 3.34%
Manufacturing: 3.17%
Personal and repair services 3.07%
Travel 2.98%
Computer/electronics: 2%
Packaged goods: 2%
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