When To Choose Direct Mail

It is my opinion and experience that the best use of mailing is to communicate with people who already know you. If you are an organization, then naturally you will want to occasionally communicate with your subscribers and donors by mail, either to keep them up-to-date with your doings or perhaps to ask for a new donation, or often both at the same time. If you are a business, the absolute best marketing thing you can do is to keep a current list of all your customers. The response rate of a mailing to people who already know you is umpteen times better than just cold calling, no matter how good a list you buy.

Sometimes though, a retail business, especially a new one, will want to communicate directly with people right in their neighborhood. Advertising in a good local newspaper is one way to do this, another is via a mass mailing to people in the neighborhood. We keep an updated list of registered voters for Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan from which we prepare local lists at a very reasonable cost.

Once in a while I will get a call from someone who wants to mail 100,000 postcards to sell their product. Usually when I tell them it will cost $35,000 or so, they think that perhaps a newspaper or radio ad might be better, and I’ll usually agree with them. As I said, mailing is not cheap, that said, a good, well planned and executed campaign can bear great results! Of course, the most important thing is to have reasonable expectations while achieving the best possible results within your budget.