Ways charities can improve their use of Direct Mail

As all good students of direct mall will tell you, there are four main criteria to be addressed for the successful use of direct mail, viz. List, Format, Timing & Offer. We shall examine each of these in order to reveal the further key considerations under each heading which will ensure that any individual mailing may be as successful as possible.

1. Your List - Selecting a list is all about targeting the audience for your message. Most people would accept that even a bad pack, sent at the wrong time, with a poor offer to a good list will fare better than good pack, sent at the right time, containing a good offer to a bad list. Such is the importance of list selection. For most campaigns the list will be a mix of house accounts and some cold lists.

Quite often, these lists will be rented from a list broker who will have categorised the names. The broker may offer you a list of names categorised as 'known to be regular donors to charity'. They will sell such a list to, say, 300 charities, each of whom mails the name - only to find the recipients suffer overkill and none of the mailings yields a significant response. Users must ask searching questions of the list broker, wherever possible seeking not global categorisations such as the example here, but more accurately reflecting the profile of the known or likely respondent.

Such is the rapid improvement in the use of technology, that it is perfectly possible to profile your likely prospects using industry sectors or geo-demographics, for example, and find that there are lists available to match your requirements.

Having selected your lists, it becomes important to clean the combined totals - to conduct a de-deduplication of names - in order that addressees are not 'turned off', and the mailing is not devalued in the eyes of the recipient, by receiving more than a single mailing. This will also eliminate unnecessary wasted postage, the savings on which will contribute towards the costs of the de-dupe.

Next, following the adage 'garbage in, garbage out', individual fields are checked as far as possible to ensure the integrity of the data. Addresses should be checked for completeness and, if necessary, enhanced to produce postally-correct ones capable of being delivered without delay. Spellings are checked.' as are salutations and titles.

 Users who have bought some piece of shrink-wrapped software and therefore believe they do not need to pay for their lists to be cleaned will often find they have only a partial solution, It is extremely doubtful they will ever be able to buy commercial software which will be this thorough.

Another useful 'sweep' is to scan the database of names and addresses for recently deceased individuals. Very little gets the industry a bad name, or results in as much negative publicity, as instances where a mailing is addressed to someone who has died. As in other areas, software is available which will screen out the 500,000 or so deaths which occur in the UK every year. Not only does the use of such software mitigate against the negative impact that mailing a dead person may produce, but also its use will prove cost-effective and response rates must, by definition, improve.

2. Your Format- Besides choosing the words which you hope will get your message across in an appealing manner, your mailing should also be designed to look attractive, be easy to read and, importantly, be easy to respond to. Almost certainly, you will include a Business Reply Envelope (BRE). Additionally, you should ideally personalise as much of the reply form as possible for the recipient, leaving them to complete only those sections which may be private and personal, such as credit card details. Not only does this degree of attention to detail make the mailing appear to be more personal; but also it will surprise no-one to learn that the less the recipient has to do, the more likely they are to take the trouble.

Maintain a donor history so that you know who helped, when and by what amount. You may then consider the frequency with which you may be able to approach them again. Perhaps more importantly, you will also be able to vary the text of your message according to the donor's past generosity. Why, for example, ask if the recipient is willing to donate £5, £10 or £20 if previously they were prepared and able to send you £25? Under such a circumstance, you could have an alternative text block for past supporters asking if they might this time donate £25, £35 or £50.

Whatever format you choose and regardless of whether it appears to work to your satisfaction, a golden rule is to continually test the formats you use. If you have what appears to be a working format, you also have a good control against which to test others and, almost certainly, it can still be improved.

Remember too that there are professionals working in the direct mail industry day in and day out who can help you. While not an agency itself, a production house such as Alphamedia Direct Marketing, handles such a volume of work that it is well placed to advise on effective formats for both speed of production and processing as well as quality.' and how the latest technologies can provide savings in costs and production time.

Too often, charities seem to divide into two camps: those who consider direct mall to be a serious, cost-effective and invaluable part of the marketing mix., and those who apparently regard it as a necessary evil. To the latter group, I would say that recent experience in the US has shown that charitable bodies who have taken their mailings 'upmarket' - using personalised envelopes and live stamps, for example - have found that they have experienced better response rates than those who mistakenly believe that, because they have non-profit making status, their mailings should reflect this and look as though they have been produced with the minimum costs attaching to them.

One prominent user of direct mail for fund-raising - the NSPCC - has found that keeping costs to the minimum is not always the first consideration. Rather, the actual amount of money raised is seen as a key measure. Not only has the NSPCC maintained a database of contributors' past levels of support and progressively sought a little bit more, it has also invested in personalised envelopes and 'live' stamps. Clearly, a printed, personalised envelope costs more than a cheap DL and even though bulk mailing discounts are still available using real stamps, the overall cost is still more. However, the NSPCC has found that the results from a better quality, better received mailing have far outweighed these additional costs.

3. Timing - Someone once said there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. Equally, direct marketers will know that there are some times when the public, or their donors, are more likely to give than at others. In some cases, this may be obvious, such as giving to the homeless at Christmas. However, other charities are driven by outside events happening anywhere in the world and know that the best time to launch an appeal is when some catastrophe or appalling situation is generating large amounts of high profile media coverage.

If mailings can be produced and despatched immediately after television coverage on the 'Nine O'clock News' or 'News At Ten', for example, response rates will far outstrip those that will result a week later. Such is the fast-moving nature of media coverage and the thirst for news that nothing stays in the spotlight for long these days and contributions fall away very rapidly with each day that passes.

In order to help such charities respond literally within days, a number of organisations lay down stocks of pre-printed letterheads, envelopes and BREs and have data 'sitting on the shelf ready to go. These mailings can then be overprinted with text and personalised very idly using high-speed laser printers literally as soon as a crisis develops. Of course, it is important that the data has been regularly cleaned and kept up-to-date.

CAFOD is the official development agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, which has developed an innovative and award-winning solution to a fund raising problem. While wanting to increase the profitability of its annual Lent appeal to donors, it also wanted them to reflect on issues facing its Third World partners. It devised a special 'CAFOD Lenten Calendar', based on a tried and tested Advent calendar formula, in which each window told a story about how donations to CAFOD were helping to make a difference to somebody's life in a developing country. Instead of simply asking for donations, the accompanying letter asked supporters to join it in preparing for Easter.

With two personalised self-mailer donation forms attached to the calendar, the clear suggestion was that one of the best ways to do this was to make a donation. The mailing was sent to 14,500 donors and produced a 25.2 per cent response. By producing copy and artwork in-house, the resulting donations covered the costs 15 times over.

4. Your Offer/Appeal- Besides just asking for money, consider how else recipients may contribute to your cause. Can you accept clothing, or would dry foods helps Can you take up other offers of assistance such as someone's time or experience?

If it is money you require, do you simply ask for a single contribution, or do you ask if the donor is prepared to have monthly deductions made through his or her payroll" Do you ask if they are prepared to sign an act of covenant, which is actually worth a lot more to you than the sum pledged or donated, and do you ask whether your organisation might be included in the individual's will when that time comes?

These are all ways in which the value of the donation may be enhanced, perhaps making the act of giving easier for the donor as part of the process. Fulfilment House direct mail letter printing  mailing house direct mail mailing lists e-mail lists marketing Direct Mail Direct Marketing mailing house fulfilment

Remember, make it easy for them to respond.

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