Tips for Personalizing your Direct Mail

Recent studies prove personalizing your direct mail can vastly improve your response rates. You've made the decision to kick start your personalized direct marketing campaign but don't know where to begin. You start the process by getting bids, decide on a vendor and even start gathering assets. Then days move into weeks, and your project is still not off the ground. You start to think you've bit off more than you can chew. Sound familiar?

Starting a variable data or personalized one-to-one campaign can sometimes be overwhelming. Here are some tips to help get you on your way to a successful personalized campaign.

Before contacting a vendor you'll need to know a few details about who you're sending your communications to and how complicated your finished print project will be.

Starting Simple

First decide where your list will come from. Are you using in-house data or buying a mail list? If working with a data administrator, find out how quickly they can pull the information you need. Discuss the availability of your list and how to best extract the information needed.

List Details

Whether using in-house or purchased lists, you’ll want to have a list of demographic and psychographic information that you want included. What determines each of your targeted segments? Information on segments such as gender, lifestyle, or age can vastly increase your response by improving the relevancy of your communications. You'll want to ask your data specialist how accurate and current your data will be.

Make sure any data you would like to use is readily available before proceeding to the creative stage.

The Creative Process

Meet with your creative team to discuss the goals of your campaign and what overall message needs to be conveyed to each group/segment. Determine what assets you have available that are relevant for each segment.

TIP: Create a postcard that speaks directly to a specific segment. This will help to figure out what areas can be made variable. If using InDesign, create a separate layer for every segment while keeping “shared” elements on one main layer.

Vendor Estimate

Once all your elements are in place, you’re ready for an accurate apples-to-apples estimate from each of your print vendors. Ensure they have an experienced variable creative team on hand to quickly fix any issues that may occur. You will find this crucial to projects containing time-sensitive information.