Small Business Marketing Ideas – Direct Mail Is Still King For Marketing Your Businesses

As a small business owner, we know that we need to keep a good eye on our budgets. Over the recent few years businesses are pushing online traffic as their primary way of marketing their small business. While this is a great thing to do, many then forget about offline marketing via direct mail to their prospects and existing customers.

Direct mail has always had the highest response rate of any media used in the marketing mix and should not be ignored or discarded.

Direct mail can be much more personalized than any form of email or other online marketing. When your customer gets a personalized letter or postcard with their name on it, they feel like you care about them. Just adding “Dear Jane,” at the beginning of your sales letter will increase the chances of them reading it and feeling like you wrote it directly to them. Even if they know that it was a mail merge, sub-consciously they feel like you sent it just to them.

So what are the best ways to use direct mail as another tool in your marketing mix?

Personalized sales letters are a great way to grab the attention of new prospects. Send them a letter introducing yourself and your products. The first letter can be very casual. Tell a little about yourself and why you are with the company or if you are the owner, that's even better. Tell them why you started the company and what your purpose is. This makes the prospect get to know you before they have even met you. Remember people buy from who they know, like and trust. You are building trust at this point.

One of the best things to do after mailing this type of letter is to give it a few days and follow up with a phone call. You aren't making a cold call any more. You are now just following up to make sure they got your letter. This will easily open the doors for a conversation and even a sales meeting.

Postcards are also a great tool to add to your marketing mix. You can get personalized postcards done that still have a note to the prospect with their name on it. Postcards are also a great way to follow up with existing clients. Send them a birthday card, or any other holiday card. You can use great systems to automate the process so the cards are automatically sent out but still have that personal touch to them. This will endear you to your customers and they will keep you in their minds.

Let's say that you are in a business complex with other businesses that cater to the same types of clients. You could get together with the other business owners in the complex and create your own community coupon packs. This would be similar to card decks or Val-Pak marketing but it's designed just for the businesses in your area. You could have them printed up and then mail them to the neighborhoods in your surrounding area. This is very targeted and the cost of this marketing program would be split between all the participating businesses. You each only have to pay a small amount to get your marketing out to your target market in your local area.

As you can see, direct marketing can be a great way to market your small business. It can not only be one more tool to add to your marketing mix but it also will produce higher responses than other more generic marketing and advertising if it is done correctly. So not matter what you are doing to market your business, direct mail should be just one more thing to add to your small business marketing mix.