Targeting Your Audience with Precision

Direct mail marketing can be a highly effective way to reach potential customers, but its success hinges on targeting the right audience. Sending a postcard or letter to people who have zero ability or propensity to use your services is a quick way to waste marketing dollars. On the flip side, targeting the right audience with precision can drastically increase your response rate and shrink your customer acquisition costs.

So how do you target the right audience for your next direct mail campaign?

Here are a few key steps for effective targeting:

1. Define your ideal customer. What problems do you solve? Who experiences those problems? Writing out a list of answers to those questions will help you choose geographic, demographic, and psychographic factors to focus in on.

2. Analyze your current customer base. When you look at your current customers, what features do most of them have in common? Targeting profiles similar to the audience you already serve gives you an advantage, because you know your product and/or services hit their pain points!

3. Use data segmentation. Narrow down your target audience by selecting specific factors to focus in on. This might lead you to only mail to a specific neighborhood, age range, or group with certain lifestyle interests. Don't know how to do that? Our team is full of data experts who can pull these lists for you and walk you through the various options.

4. Test and refine. Once you send out a campaign, make sure you have the tools in place to capture data about the response you receive. That data can help to inform you about which segmentation points were most effective. Double down on your next campaign and leave the least effective segmentation points behind!

What would it look like if you failed to target the right audience?

Targeting the Wrong Audience

Scenario: A lawn care service in a suburban area

Their Approach: The company purchases a general mailing list for the entire county without any segmentation. They send out a generic flyer advertising their services to every address, including apartment complexes, rural areas outside their service zone, and neighborhoods with primarily senior residents.

The mailer uses technical jargon about lawn care and offers a discount on services that many recipients don't need or can't use.

Result: The campaign sees a dismal 0.1% response rate. Most mailers are discarded without being read, and the few responses include complaints from apartment dwellers and seniors unable to use the service.

Targeting the Right Audience

Connect with one of our expert marketing consultants today to come up with a plan to craft an effective direct mail campaign. We love to see our clients find success. That means doing whatever we can to deliver the best results possible via direct mail. A direct mail campaign's success can hinge on who you target. Let's work together to get your business in front of your next customers!