As with most business decisions, setting up a budget for your direct mail marketing campaign is crucial to making sure you’re getting the most for your money. Gauging expectations and measuring risk vs. reward is always a balancing act, but by maximizing your use of budget, you can make it so you get far more for your money.

Refine Your Mailing List

By regularly going through your mailing lists and tracking success rates, you can identify entries that either never respond to mailers or have moved away. If you haven’t trimmed down your marketing lists before, the first time may be time consuming, but well worth it. Reducing the number of mailers to dead-ends will usually increase your return on investment (ROI).

Narrow The Scope Of Your Mailers

Instead of cutting back on larger mailers, maybe narrowing the focus of your campaigns is the better option. By utilizing specifically targeted mailing lists, you can send fewer mailers directly to the audiences that would be most likely to respond to them. Using this method, it’s possible to actually send out several separate mailing campaigns directly targeting different groups. This way, everyone who receives a mailer will be more likely to respond.

Consider The Cost Of Your Marketing Materials

Depending on what kinds of mailers you send, the cost will vary. Higher quality materials will obviously cost more, and more complex mailers will also incur a higher fee. For mailing campaigns that cover a large number of customers, something simple, like a postcard, is a cheap yet effective option. When you have a smaller mailing list, you can spend more on elaborate designs and mailers.

Recycle Mailer Designs

If you have previously done work for a direct mail marketing campaign, there’s no rule to say you can’t reuse it. You’ll still want to check it out to make sure that the dates are correct, and there’s no more obsolete or incorrect information, but having the layout already set up saves a lot of time and energy.

Get It All Done In One Place

If you’re not designing and printing in house, finding somewhere that can handle all of your direct mail needs is key. Getting everything done by one service saves time, money, and streamlines communication throughout the process. While hiring out to a professional design service can be seen as an extra expense, having experts design, print, and mail everything for you can free you up to do more in-house to  bolster your business. These kinds of services also may have ways of tracking your mailer success rates to further improve responses in the future.