Lead Generation Experts Reveal... The Five Best Ways to Use Direct Mail to Generate Leads For Your Business... Guaranteed! 

Direct mail is an excellent way to generate leads and sales for your business. Compared to traditional advertising, direct mail is more cost-effective and results are much easier to measure.

Advertisers are always hard-pressed to determine the effectiveness of a TV commercial. For instance, how can you say exactly how many people bought the product because of the TV commercial? Meanwhile, direct marketers know exactly how many inquiries and purchases their direct mail campaign has produced. All they have to do is count the responses.

Whether conducted via snail mail or e-mail, direct mail can produce outstanding results. In this day and age, e-mail is the preferred direct mail medium – according to recent estimates, direct mail via e-mail can produce a 5% to 15% response rate compared to only 1% to 3% for snail mail – but snail mail still works. What should you choose? That would depend on the nature of your product and the Internet habits of your prospective customers.

These percentages may not seem like much on the surface, but once you consider that you don't have to spend much in direct mail, then these returns are nothing to sneeze at. If your use snail mail, you only spend on paper, envelopes and stamps. If your use e-mail, why, your direct mail effort is virtually free.

In direct mail, you're the one who selects the recipients of your promotion. Your goal is to generate leads, which, hopefully, translates into sales. To generate leads, you have to motivate your prospects to respond to your direct mail campaign. Here are the five best ways to do that.

1. Begin by Building a Powerful List

Here’s the secret to the success of any direct mail campaign: you should reach the right people. And who are the right people? They are the ones who are excellent candidates to purchase your products or use your service.

In other words, you don't simply get a thick telephone directory and write to everyone there, hoping that the law of averages smiles on your diligence and gifts you with a few sales. This will be a total waste.

Instead, you should take great care in building your list. List only prospects that conform to your buyer's profile in terms of their location, demographics (sex, age, religion, race, etc.), psychographics (their lifestyle, values, attitudes, etc.) and similar factors.

2. Begin with your current customers

Any direct mail effort should first focus on your current customer base. That’s because 20% of your current customers will produce about 80% of your repeat business.

The beauty of targeting your customers is that you already know they are inclined to buy your product because they’ve purchased it before. Hence, if you’re building a list of prospects for your direct mail campaign, place all your current customers at the top of your list.

And here’s another reason why current clients are worth their weight in gold: If they order your product a second time, chances are that they will keep on buying from you every time they need your product. That’s a lifetime of sales just waiting in the wings.

3. Give something away for free

When it comes to generating interest and responses, perhaps there is no word in the world of marketing that is more powerful than the word “free”.

People just love to get free stuff, especially if it appeals to their self-interest, such as free samples, a discount or entry into a raffle with big prizes. These approaches have been known to generate as much as 50% more leads.

Make sure you include a deadline in your special offer. If people know a free gift expires at a certain time, they are much more likely to respond right away.

4. Use copy that captures their interest

Did you know that the success of a direct mail campaign is tied directly to how long your prospect keeps reading your letter? If he reads you copy until the very end, you have a chance at getting a very good lead.

This doesn’t mean that you have to write like a poet. On the contrary, people are more responsive to direct mail if it communicates the way they do – in plain, everyday language. Always try to appeal to their self-interest. And remember that no one wants to read copy that’s too long.

Moreover, if a prospect writes back to you, your copy is less important in succeeding letters since, from that point onwards, it will be your product that will determine if this lead turns into a sale.

5. Focus on your product’s benefits, not its features

This is a well-known adage in advertising circles: people buy benefits, not products. They buy clean, beautiful hair, not shampoo. They buy non-stop entertainment and drama, not a television set. They buy a lifestyle of fun and pleasure, not an automobile.

Your direct mail should also appeal to potential customers in this manner.

Here’s one thing you can do here: focus on the benefits of your best-selling products. These are the products that apparently offer the benefits that customers want the most. You can’t go wrong putting them on the frontline of your direct mail campaign.