- The up-front cost of direct mail advertising
- The opportunity cost of direct mail advertising
- When is it the right move?
- Using digital tools to offset the cost of direct mail advertising
Q: What is the cost of direct mail advertising? Can direct mail marketing benefit my business?
A: The price of your direct mail advertising initiatives will vary depending on the number of mailers you’re sending, the type of mailing list you’re using, the cost of printing the mailer, and the weight of each mailer. Yes, direct mail marketing is a great way to form a deeper connection with consumers, increase brand recognition, and target a specific audience.
The modern market values attention over everything.
In the past, consumer loyalty was high, and high-quality offerings were expected from any legitimate company. These things are still important, but more important is how visible your business is.
Possibly due to Americans’ exponentially increasing use of the internet, a booming ecommerce market that rewards companies who hold consumer attention, business owners are in a position that requires careful thought to digital-first advertisements and other marketing initiatives.
Standard digital marketing techniques like email advertisements, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and video marketing are all at the forefront of the public consciousness – but standing out in these areas puts your business up against a sea of competitors.
Thankfully, there are several ways you can help your business stand out while positioning it for success without having to compete directly for consumer attention with the biggest names in advertising.
Consider direct mail marketing as one of these solutions.
In this article, we’ll cover the up-front cost of direct mail advertising, the opportunity cost of direct mail advertising, and how to tell when your business should employ direct mail marketing. Finally, we’ll look at ways you can use existing digital tools to offset your business’s mail marketing costs.
So, if you’ve ever wondered “how much does it cost to do direct mail advertising” – you’re in the right place!
- The up-front cost of direct mail advertising
- The opportunity cost of direct mail advertising
- When is it the right move?
- Using digital tools to offset the cost of direct mail advertising
The up-front cost of direct mail advertising
Before we jump into the cost of doing direct mail advertising, let’s take a moment to explore what mail marketing is.
Although some might think of direct mail advertisements as a forgotten kind of marketing, the truth is that direct mail marketing stands out.
Direct mail marketing is an advertisement strategy wherein your business sends physical mail, like postcards, brochures, catalogs, self-mailers, letters, or package mailers.
Keep in mind, direct mail advertising isn’t the same thing as business reply mail.
Business reply mail, or BRM, is a service the USPS offers that allows businesses to mail letters with pre-paid postage and an included return envelope. On the other hand, direct mail marketing is the simple act of mailing targeted consumers physical mail.
Read more: What Does Your Business Reply Mail Return Address Say About Your Business
To help you better understand, we’ve created a brief list of what each type entails.
Postcards
Postcards are simple, to the point, and typically contain one clear message that explains the cards’ purpose. These cards are commonly used to announce new product or service offerings, promote ongoing sales, or act as a reminder of a special offer. That said, you can technically put anything you’d like on a postcard.
Brochure
Brochures are a bit more expensive and a lot more detailed. The standard direct mail brochure might include information about your business’s specific product or service offerings, an overview of your company’s current offerings, or other widely applicable information about your organization.
Catalogs
Similar to brochures, catalogs are different in the sense that they’re used to cover several different kinds of products or services. Where a brochure is more focused on information, a catalog is more focused on products and services.
Self-mailers
These are direct mailers that don’t come with an envelope, so the mailer itself is all that arrives to consumers.
Letters
Receiving a personalized letter is always a rewarding feeling. Luckily, your business can replicate that feeling for potential customers. Letters are used to follow up on leads or to communicate with existing customers while forming a deeper connection with your audience.
Package mailers
Package mailers are large, often contain multiple components, and are usually more expensive. Because of the higher price, they’re usually used to promote higher-end offerings.
Read more: Business Mail List
Understandably, these options have different price tags, leading to several different direct costs for mail advertising campaigns.
Two steps contribute to the cost of direct mail marketing, developing the marketing materials and then sending them out. While you might be able to save money on the first step, there’s virtually no way to avoid the second.
First, your company needs marketing materials. This means you’ll either have to pay for developing these materials or develop them yourself.
If you’re considering making marketing materials in-house, you’ll need to consider the opportunity cost of doing so.
Finding your audience, creating designs, testing those designs, and printing the designs take up a lot of time and money. If you can handle these tasks, this is a great way to reduce the cost of direct mail advertising.
We’ve created a brief guide for those who decide to go in this direction.
Establish your target audience
You’ll need to gather as much data as possible to identify your audience’s demographics. You will also need to look for your target customers’ interests: what social media platforms they use, where they’re located, and other buying habits they might have. The more you understand your target audience, the more effective your campaign will be.
Set clear goals
Whether generating leads, increasing your sales, cultivating engagement, or raising brand awareness, you need to have a clear idea of what you want your campaign to accomplish. Also, you want these goals to be measurable and attainable. If you’re shooting for engagement, set precise percentages for the social media profiles you want to increase. If you’re aiming for higher sales, don’t set unrealistic goals that you’ll be unable to meet.
Create the content
Using graphic design software like Adobe Illustrator, Figma, or GIMP, you will need to create visually compelling content and write copy that compels your audience to take the action you want them to take. Whatever content you create, you want it to be consistent with branding you’ve already established while highlighting the benefits you want to share.
Testing
You can test your marketing materials with a focus group, but you can also accomplish the same thing with small groups of individuals. That said, it’s important for you to show people that will give you reasonable feedback. If you test as you go, you’ll be able to make necessary changes on the fly.
Printing and mailing
Finally, you’ll need to print the materials. For many entrepreneurs, this is a step they will outsource even if they’ve created everything up to this point in-house. Printing everything in-house can be prohibitively expensive. Unless you’re prepared to handle this, outsourcing the printing and mailing is a great way to save money.
For those that don’t go this route, you’ll likely have to hire someone to write the copy and create the graphics and images for your mailing advertisements.
Next, you’ll need to pay for the physical supplies and shipping. Envelopes, postage, and the paper you’re going to print on all cost money.
Direct mail advertising will include shipping and mailing costs, no matter how you approach it. Once you’ve accounted for these costs, you can curate your mailing list to ensure that you’re only sending physical mailers to consumers who will react to the marketing.
The opportunity cost of direct mail advertising
In addition to the up-front cost of direct mail advertising, you’ll need to consider the opportunity cost of what you aren’t doing because you’re investing in direct mail marketing.
If your business is using a Virtual Office with a US mailing address, you won’t have to worry about the cost of a PO box or other secondary mailbox. Thankfully, securing a Virtual Office with a physical mailing address is very straightforward.
Read more: A Complete Guide to Starting a Business Using a US Mailing Address
The most obvious lost opportunity cost is the time and money that you could use to advertise online. Sure, the competition might be higher, but digital marketing is almost always a significantly cheaper method of achieving similar or better exposure.
If you’re dealing with a budget that allows you to focus on several marketing avenues simultaneously, that’s great. However, you still need to consider whether or not your resources would be better allocated for other initiatives.
If you cannot focus on several different areas, you’ll need to determine which marketing initiative will quickly bring you the most exposure fast.
Outside of digital marketing, you have countless physical alternatives available as well.
Think about billboards, fliers, banners, or bus or train ads. While these physical options are typically not going to be as cost-efficient or effective, it’s essential to consider your options before jumping into direct mail marketing.
Asking “how much does direct mail advertising cost” is a great start, but understanding how to best spend your hard-earned money is how you set your business up for continued long-term success.
That said, there are situations wherein the cost of direct mail advertising is well worth it.
When is mail advertising the right move?
When analyzing your marketing strategy, you should start by getting some estimates for your mail and digital marketing campaigns.
With quotes on the cost of direct mail marketing vs. the cost of digital marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to better weigh your options.
From there, you need to consider your target audience. Digital marketing campaigns are a great way to reach a huge demographic, but there are some demographics that just won’t see digital advertisements, regardless of how much money you spend on digital initiatives.
If you’re selling primarily to older, less tech-savvy consumers, your digital marketing campaign probably won’t convert the way your direct mail campaign will. Use these considerations to estimate your potential returns per X number of views.
Once you have estimated your cost and potential returns, put the numbers side by side and see which yields a higher net profit.
Keep in mind, this is just a starting point. The best strategy is to experiment and adjust as you learn.
Additionally, there are several other scenarios in which direct mail marketing can effectively connect with consumers.
We’ve put together another list of straightforward situations that might warrant using direct mail advertisements.
Seniors
Although internet usage is rising, many seniors prefer the feel of physical mail instead of the somewhat impersonal feeling of a digital advertisement. If you’re hoping to reach seniors, direct mail marketing can provide a great way to connect with these individuals – especially through letters and more personal styles of direct mail marketing.
High-income households
Consumers with higher incomes can be difficult to reach, but if you’re promoting a higher-end product or service, simply sending physical mailers isn’t a bad way to remind these individuals of your company. To reach high-income households, package mailers that make your brand’s intentions clear are a great way to connect.
Rural areas
Contrary to popular belief, there are still a surprising 19 million Americans that don’t have access to the internet. Naturally, most businesses won’t be selling specifically to individuals without the internet, but if you are, direct mail is the best way to do it.
Specific interest groups
If your company has offerings that appeal to consumers in a specific niche, you can use direct mail to target these individuals. These groups could be as broad as “pet owners” or as specific as “bank employees”, the idea is to use direct mail with consumers that will immediately react, whether emotionally or physically, to your advertisements.
Business owners
As a business owner, you understand how stressful it is to run a business. Because of this, it stands to reason that you’d be interested in a direct mailer that claims to know how to make your life easier. If your business focuses on B2B transactions, direct mail is a great way to connect with business owners.
One great method that allows you to get the most out of the cost of direct mail advertising is using contextual marketing to benefit your direct mail campaign.
Contextual marketing is effectively the antithesis of behavioral advertisements.
An example of a behavioral advertisement would be after you google “places to run near me”, you’re constantly bombarded with advertisements about running shoes, running gear, and other running accessories. Behavioral advertising is data collection and makes countless consumers very uncomfortable.
Contextual marketing, when digital, uses the content that the viewer is currently watching or interacting with to determine the advertisements that the viewer sees. Because contextual marketing doesn’t use past data, it doesn’t make consumers feel as uncomfortable.
Physical contextual marketing is similar, using the context of a consumer’s location or environment to determine what advertisements that individual sees.
Read more: Context is Everything: Your Guide to Contextual Marketing
The idea is to combine contextual marketing with your direct mail campaign. Use the context of your target audiences’ surroundings to determine who should receive direct mail advertisements and what those advertisements should entail.
This allows you to reach your target demographic with highly targeted advertisements tailored to their location, interests, previous behaviors, and more.
Doing so will increase the chances that the advertisement will be noticed and, most importantly, acted upon, leading to higher conversion rates and completing the goals you’d previously set for yourself.
Using digital tools to offset the cost of direct mail advertising
The cost of direct mail advertising can vary depending on the size of your mailing list and your specific marketing materials.
You should get a rough estimate of your costs and returns before committing to a marketing campaign via mail.
Remember, asking questions like “how much does direct mail cost” is a great start, but without the proper information, your company might waste money that could’ve been reinvested into other forms of marketing.
Regardless of how you choose to advertise, backing your materials with a professional Virtual Office is a great way to build trust and increase your returns.
With a Virtual Office, you’re providing your company with legitimacy, you have access to easily reservable meeting rooms and coworking spaces, you have several different mail forwarding options, and you have access to a friendly and professional onsite staff that can help with any issues you might experience.
Because each office is backed by physical space, you can register your business within any state, and in almost any city you’d like, regardless of where you live. This means that you can start your financial services business with an address in Upper Manhattan or your SaaS company with a Silicon Valley address; the choice is yours.
Your Virtual Office will also provide the perfect way to break the monotony of working from home in the same place where you eat, sleep, and relax. With easily reservable coworking spaces, you have the perfect place to get away from home while surrounding yourself with like-minded entrepreneurs.
If you’ve ever tried to host a virtual meeting in a crowded coffee shop, you know the importance of having access to a workspace that is private, quiet, and has high-speed internet. With your Virtual Office, you can easily reserve meeting rooms of varying sizes to accommodate any size of meeting you need to have.
Once you’ve found a target demographic that you’d like to use direct mail advertising to interact with, your Virtual Office has four different tiers of mail forwarding that can help you stay on top of incoming replies.
Instead of trying to cope with combining your business mail and personal mail, allow Alliance to handle the sorting, forwarding, and security of your correspondences.
Outside of Alliance’s Virtual Offices, several other digital tools can help offset the cost of direct mail advertising.
First, consider our Live Receptionists.
Alliance’s Live Receptionists provide a cost-efficient way for you to stop worrying about incoming phone calls and worry about positioning your business.
When you’re trying to answer the phone while working on other, more minute details of your company, you risk upsetting the customer on the other line. Don’t try and multitask while you’re hoping to secure new customers. Instead, allow our receptionists to personally screen and answer each call, providing a friendly voice for any potential customers to associate with your business.
Outside of these clear benefits, using a Live Receptionist can help negate the necessity of a receptionist position at your company. Instead of spending time pouring through applications, sitting through lengthy interviews, and going through the entire hiring process, allow our Live Receptionists to take care of customers for you.
Further reading
- Starting a Business with a US Mailing Address
- What Does Your Business Reply Mail Return Address Say About Your Business?
- Context is Everything: Your Guide to Contextual Marketing
- Small Business Supply Chain Optimization: Get What You Need To Grow
- Business Mail List
Alliance Virtual Offices provides several tools for established entrepreneurs to position their businesses for continued success. Whether you’re new to business ownership or just getting your footing, Alliance has something for you.
Outside of our Virtual Offices and Live Receptionists, Alliance provides several other methods of offsetting the cost of direct mail advertising.
Contact us today to see how Alliance can help your business cope with the cost of direct mail advertising when necessary and how we can help your business position itself for growth when it isn’t.
Check out Alliance’s Virtual Blog as well for more tips!
