Direct Marketing and the Environment- Part 2!

3) Review the format and design of your mailings

Could you mailings be simplified? It is important to review your mailings and consider whether your message is being sent in a powerful yet environmentally friendly way. Pages and pages of information are often preventable, and can actually deter the end receiver from reading the mailing. Could you reduce the amount of information in your mailings? Similarly, are you sending information that includes avoidable inserts? Regularly reviewing the content of mailings can both minimise the environmental impact and also ensure that your business is producing effective content.

4) Recycled or Recyclable?

Can your mailings be sent on recycled paper, it is important to remember that “recycled paper” can mean anything from 100% recycled to 1% recycled! If this is not something that you could consider, can your mailings be recycled? A small proportion of mailings are not recyclable. Staples are acceptable for recycling, but some glues used in binding for example, mean that the whole mailing will be rejected for recycling.

Direct marketing techniques can provide a range of benefits to your business, but you need to keep a careful eye on its environmental impact now more than ever. Don’t forget that if you are using direct marketing to either existing or potential customers, the quality and accuracy of your data needs to be up to standard, to avoid wastage and get the best possible results.

Direct Marketing and The Environment- Part 1!

We recently wrote an article on how to reduce the environmental impact of Direct Marketing. This article was a huge hit and we thought we would share it with you on our blog.

The Direct Marketing Association has long been spearheading a campaign to reduce the environmental impact of direct marketing. Implementing these simple steps can enable your business to minimise its environmental impact. Evaluating your environmental impact can also prove to be cost effective and can assist in reducing direct marketing costs. Also, potential customers may be more responsive to your business if they can see it making efforts to reduce environmental impact.

If you use direct mail as a promotional tool, you can easily ensure that your business is reducing wastage by using the following mechanisms.

1) Using the Mailing Preference Service

The Mailing Preference Service (MPS) allows consumers and businesses to register their wish to limit the amount of direct mail they receive. Simply checking your data lists will ensure that you do not mail those who have opted into the MPS, and so avoid unnecessary wastage.

2) Cleansing your lists

Cleansing your list will ensure that you are targeting a more specific audience. Improved targeting reduces the risk of “Junk Mail”. No business wants their mailings to be perceived as “junk”, and a targeted approach can reduce unnecessary costs to your business and an unnecessary waste of resources.

Marketing's Top 100 Direct Mail Advertisers

Here is a great link to a Brand Republic Nielsen Media Research Report on Direct Mail Advertisers. There are some interesing points about the trends, and business spending on Direct Mail.

For those of you who like a summary of the findings, here is is;

• 'Direct mail gets a bad press. Most people receive more email spam than junk mail, but letter boxes don't have spam filters,'


• 'Finance has mass-mailed more than any other industry, so there is a market correction going on,'


• 'Experts agree that direct mail is best used to provide information and offers to existing customers. Mail that cold-targets potential customers often delivers poor response rates, and inevitably gets dismissed as junk mail.'

Hello! (And Welcome)

Welcome to our Blog! Who are we? We are Direct Marketing Specialists based in the UK, and we will be posting our hints and tips for you to use, to successfully help you to improve the quality of your Direct Marketing.

We hate the term "Junk Mail" and are on a single-handed mission to eliminate "Junk" and assist you in producing Top Quality information (mail and otherwise), which ends up in the hands of the right people.

We hope that you enjoy reading our Blog!

How to.... Write Direct Mail Letters that Sell

What tricks are used by professional copywriters to create direct mail letters that really sell? Follow this step by step guide to create your own truly effective direct mail letters, and start transforming your direct mail campaigns.

If you want some serious response from your direct marketing, get serious about your direct mail letters.

The success of your direct mail campaigns stand and fall on the quality of your letter. But when it comes to direct mail letters, you can find huge differences in style and quality.

Unfortunately all too many businesses send out woolly, ungrammatical and poorly composed mailing letters, which do more damage than good. On the other hand a good direct mail letter needs to be clear, punchy and persuasive.

So what tricks are used by professional copywriters to create direct mail letters that really sell? Here are some simple steps to help you get serious about your direct mail letters:

Step 1: Hook Your Reader
The first line of letter is vital. Your opening gambit should be short and precise, with a time limit to create urgency with the reader. Good headings should be short and clear, and go easy on alliteration and superlatives.

Step 2: Paint a Picture
Having hooked your reader with the headline work hard on the first paragraph, as this is where you will engage your reader and make him want to read more. Use the first paragraph to paint a picture of what you can offer or what problem you can solve in the readers mind - as the old saying goes, people “buy the sizzle not the steak”. Don’t make it too long, short and punchy is better.

Step 3: Time to Tease
Now we have hooked the reader and engaged him we need to tease him a little in the next paragraph. Write something that’s going to make the reader want to visit your shop, give you a call for a chat, or come to your website, by implying some other benefits that may be on offer – but only if they take the action you want them to.

Step 4: Bullet the Key Points
At this point bullet points are good to use to reiterate the points you have made and allow the casual skim reader to pick up the points you want. Some readers may just scan the letter anyway, and pick up on the visual cues the bullet points provide, so make sure the bullets include really valid key points, and not fluff.

Step 5: Add a Call to Action
OK we have hooked and engaged the reader and reiterated the relevant points, we are now ready to summarise and provide a call to action.
A call to action tells the reader clearly what you want them to do or how to make a purchase. Surprisingly often this key step is overlooked.

Step 6: Don't Forget To P.S.
Now you need to sign off and include a P.S in your mailing letter. The P.S. is the second most read part of the direct mail letter after the heading, so it’s where you want to hammer home your message. Adding a P.S. Allows you to summarise the key points you want to make, although bear in mind that if the letter is a very formal approach it is not always appropriate.

Step 7: Flower the Text
Now the main letter is finished, you can also indulge in a little decoration of the text, just to give the eye some ‘flowers’ in the text to help keep the readers attention. For example – break up text with hyphens. You can also use; semi colons and colons to create a dramatic pause just before a key point. And add just the occasional keyword in bold, underline or italic – but use sparingly.