In the tradition of direct mail, a rule states that you can determine the achievement of your efforts by a minimum response rate of 1-2%. This means, if you send out 10,000 items, your mailing will have a positive response from 100 people. This is just one facet of what you can achieve with direct mail.
How about a different view from the world of small business. Especially those small business people who work for themselves.
To help you remember these two different view, we’ll name them:
1. The Percentage Perspective. This is the standard 1-2% that you get from your mailings. Most businesses measure the amount of direct mail they send out by this standard.
If you own a sandwich shop, and doing a “use this card to receive 10% off on your next order” mailing to all homes within a few miles of your business, you may have a list of mail outs to 10,000 people.
Make sure to pay careful attention to the customer response rate, and know exactly where they are coming from. If most customers are coming from a certain area in the neighborhood, then send most of your future mailings to that area.
2. The next perspective is that you only require a few. This is for the person who works for them self and they sell services that take a good amount of time to supply. Examples of this could be graphic design, PR or interior design.
All these people need are some new or repeat clients and a promotional mailing would work quite well in this case. If they were to send out thousands of direct mailings then they would become too busy and could lose some of their original clients.
