• Written by Tom Lauck, Creative-Ops

With all the current excitement over email marketing, people have forgotten that direct mail is more effective for prospecting. That’s right. Email marketing, while great for cultivating relationships, is not as effective as a prospecting tool. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the elements of making your next B2B direct mail campaign more successful.

Set Your Goals

We all have goals. Usually they have to do with products or services. We want to tell people about them, invite them to trade shows, and eventually sell them our products and services. In B2B marketing, with inherently longer sales cycles, direct mail can be used effectively as the first touch point. Your goal is to get them to act.

With that said, your offer should be something easy for a prospect to act upon. Don't make them mail you a postcard, answer a questionnaire, or even pick up the phone! Integrate your offer with your website and direct your prospects to a specific landing page. On your landing page, you can make your next offer, which should be another easy step such as asking them to opt-in to your email database. You're okay as long as you focus each offer on something that truly benefits the customer.

Identify Your Target Audience

List brokers are everywhere. But they can’t tell you who you should target. You need to determine, as narrowly as possible, who are likely candidates for your products and services. Identifying prospects that have needs similar to your existing customers often works well. But you must be specific. Who makes the decision to buy? Who controls the budget? Who influences the buying decision? Can you identify job titles, industry segments, demographics, or psychographics based on your current customer base? That's where to start.

Tracking / Testing

Tracking and testing is the backbone of the direct marketing industry. The rule is that, for any particular mailing, you don’t know anything for certain without testing. You don’t know if your offer is right. You don’t know if your creative will strike a chord with prospects. You don’t know if your prospects prefer long copy or short. You don’t know if a self-mailer will outpull a classic package. You don’t know if one offer is more attractive than another. So rather than develop one mailing that embodies your best assumptions, you should develop a few different versions of your mailing and test them against each other.

Now the fun begins. Take a random sample of your master list and break it into the same number of segments as you have versions. To track the success of each version, create separate landing pages for each one. Simple analytics will show you which offer, package, or creative approach drove more traffic to your landing page. The winner of these preliminary tests becomes your control version. Mail that version to the majority of your list.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that the process is over. It's not. Because the audience is not a fixed target. They are growing, their needs are changing, their knowledge (about your products and services) is changing with each mailing. You have to constantly test new ideas, and constantly challenge the control version to ensure continued success.