In an earlier post, we wrote about the importance of not letting your marketing message get stale. A common example is mailing the same request or offer to the same list, month after month after month. Direct mail response tracks along a bell curve, whether you’re using it for sales purposes, fundraising or member development. Even the best of programs reaches a saturation point, where everyone who is likely to respond has already done so, and at that point, you are throwing bad money after good!
Freshening the message can be as simple as changing the graphics. Picture
Adding some vitality to your marketing campaign can be done by freshening up the graphics.
yourself going through your own stack of mail. You see things that you’ve seen before, and experience has shown that if you’ve seen something once or twice, you might actually look closely at it the third time and make a decision about whether to respond. But let’s say you do that, and you choose not to respond, and then you see the same mailer over and over again. Do you take even a second before tossing the mailer in the trash pile? Or let’s say that you look closely and you do respond. Does seeing the same mailer again and again encourage you to do it again?
Experts like to say that direct mail works until it stops working. They also say that the best strategy is to freshen the message — or change the offer or change the list — before you get too far past the point of diminishing returns. That’s how you keep it working!
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