So what is Neuromarketing? It’s marketing that focuses on the brain. Since the brain makes all of our decisions, we should target our marketing there. Most current direct mail marketing is focused on upper brain function that involves reasoning, sometimes with emotion. This is the wrong approach. It involves too much thinking and is a turn off to many recipients. So let’s take a look at the brain and where we want to target our direct mail.
The best way to increase your chances of a great response is to mail to people who are interested in your product or service. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to create personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Many marketers are familiar with personas in their inbound or digital marketing, but for some reason have not applied them to their direct mail campaigns.
The very first thing that direct mail needs to do in the mail box is catch people’s attention. So many marketers struggle with how to do that. There are many options out there for you to choose from that can take your drab mail piece to a fab mail piece.
One of the most common industries to use direct mail is the nonprofit sector. Most nonprofits have more people to serve and are getting less in donated funds. This creates a large gap between the needs and your ability to provide them. This gap drives nonprofits to create more fundraising campaigns as well as prospecting for new donors. So let’s look at how direct mail can drive your response to increase your donations. Direct mail is more costly than sending out an email due to printing, mailing and postage costs, but you can increase your ROI to more than cover that cost.
Did you know that direct mail is considered by recipients to be the most trustworthy of all marketing channels? How honest are you? It is extremely important to create copy, calls to action and offers with complete honesty and transparency. This is not the time for a bait and switch or a poorly worded offer that is interpreted wrong. Direct mail is about respect; not only the recipient’s intelligence but also their time. Creating targeted offers they want to receive not only gets you better results, but also makes your prospects and customers happy. I like the quote by James E. Faust “Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living and truth loving”. Can your customers and prospects count on your direct mail pieces to be honest with them?
Over the last 28 years, I have seen a lot of good direct mail and a lot of mistakes. Sometimes they have been sad, like when a nonprofit had the wrong return address on their courtesy reply envelopes. They did not get any of the donation checks delivered to them. Other times, they been really funny. Like the time when a wrong phone number was put on the mail piece so when recipients called it they reached a sex hotline. That was pretty funny. The worst mistakes are the ones that cost you the most money, so learning what not to do can really help.
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