Fact: direct mail design is not only one of the most important elements of direct mail templates or, indeed any direct mail piece… but it is also one of the most poorly understood.

Direct mail design, when done right, can easily improve responses by 60% or more

The BIG Direct Mail Design Con: Aesthetics Sell

They don’t. In fact, ugly direct mail design often works best. You’ll often hear it said by advertisement designers and other “creative” marketing types, “you need whitespace… whitespace sells“. Not only does this make no sense at all, but it’s not borne out by the evidence. In countless tests over the years it’s almost always the case the more copy there is in a piece, the more sales it makes. It’s not always true, because good short copy will do better than bad long copy, but all things being equal it’s as close to a certainty as we ever get in marketing.

And if whitespace sells… then, surely, the ultimate ad would simply be a blank page.

“No, of course not“, the creative designer shrills… “you have to tell them what it’s about!”

Exactly. And… you do that with copy.

What’s more… the more you tell, the more you sell. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of direct response marketing here, because it’s not the place for it. You can either read this article here, or you can simply take it on faith for now and then study the detail at your leisure. For now, I want to focus very tightly on direct mail design, and give you a simple direct mail marketing template you can use pretty much anywhere. If your catalog designers, or direct mail design and marketing agency won’t follow these guidelines, then you need to find one one that will.

Because I want to caution you: I guarantee if you take these tips along to your advertisement designers, your design and marketing agency or whoever is running your print design services, they will loathe them.

They will bombard you will all sorts of fancy talk about colour choice, branding, aesthetics and other gobbledegook… but one thing they won’t talk about is specific measurement of response and ROI.

If they do this, there is a very simple answer. All you have to do is suggest they create two versions of the ad or marketing piece: one like they want to do it, and one like you want them to do it. And then tell them you’ll test both ads alongside one another in a split test. And the one whose ad performs worst in terms of measurable return on investment pays the fee for both ads. May the best direct mail design win, and all that.

My guess is you won’t find anyone willing to do that. They are full of puffery and high ideas, but they won’t put their money where it counts.They will be very free with their ideas when it’s your money on the line.

And direct mail design is just as important as the copy (not many copywriters know that, or want to admit it).

Fundamentals of Direct Mail Design

The premise we’re working from is simply this: to bring you a positive ROI, your ads and other marketing pieces have to be responded to.

To be responded to, they have to be comprehended.

And to be comprehended, they have to be read.

This sequence of events, presented in reverse above, is inescapable. Because if your ads aren’t being read, they’re not being understood, and if they’re not being understood, they cannot be responded to. None of this is theory and it’s all backed up with peer-reviewed research in Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes?, by C. Wheildon.

It’s worth getting the book if you’re into reading nerdy stuff as much as I am, but if you’re more interested in just using what we know tends to work best, then this is enough.

In short, Wheildon tested people in a rigorous scientific manner and measured the results against their comprehension after reading various texts in a number of layouts, designs, fonts and colours.

You might think comprehension is a long way from sales, but no. If comprehension increases it can do so only because the text is being read more. And higher readership must needs lead to a higher response. I strongly urge you to start with the layout, format and fonts shown below.

Once you have a baseline result from that, then you can fiddle and fart around being as creative as you like.

You’re going to get it in the neck from your website people and graphic designers, but just remember who’s working for whom, eh?

Direct Mail Design – layout

The image below, Fig 1. shows a pretty much ideal direct mail design template. If nothing else, it is a place to start with your direct mail design, and you can adapt it to a postcard design template, a direct mail brochure, images for website design, and any form of printing and design where you want a response. Postcard graphic design is especially vulnerable to bad design, because the designers seem, perhaps unwittingly, to follow the lead of the holiday and vacation postcards (picture on one side, a little text on the other). Big mistake. All the principles of direct mail design apply to postcard design templates as well as letters and more traditional pieces.

You can click on the image and open it up full-size in another tab and then print it. A barrel of laughs giving that to your design guy or gal, I can tell you.

Fig 1: Ideal direct mail design template

It’s all very straightforward and there are solid reasons for everything being where it is, and all backed up with peer-reviewed research and evidence. In brief, the reason for the image in the top right is that’s where the eye enters the page. Faces are good because they draw the eye, and a caption underneath it has very high readership.

If you simply must have a full-width image at the top of your page, have it above your headline. If you don’t, the picture draws the eye and then it sinks down under something called reading gravity. The upshot is, your headline won’t get read – and that’s the most important part of your marketing piece or ad because it tells the reader what it’s all about (just one example of how bad design can make or break a direct mail piece).

The bottom left corner is a fallow corner. Copy there is often missed, so it’s a good place for an image. And the bottom right corner, the terminal anchor is the last thing the eye sees before the reader takes the next action, whether it’s to move to the next page or follow the instructions in the call to action.

As you can see, there is science behind this.

Direct Mail Design – typography

Most creative designer design a direct mail brochure, ad or letter to be first and foremost visually appealing. And they extend this muddled thinking to the typography, and not just the layout

Your body copy should be fully justified, and set in dark ink on light background. Black on white is fine; black on ivory is perhaps best.

If you’re designing a marketing letter or ad for print, then use a serif font — in most cases I use Adobe Caslon Pro, or if I’m doing something to appear in a publication, I’ll do my best to match the font they use for their editorial.

The main part of my own paper-print newsletter is in Corona. The font size is 11pt with 13pt leading. I use this because it’s a good old-fashioned font that’s easy to read, something essential for comprehension (this isn’t just about direct mail design and advertising — I want people to read my newsletter and understand it, so they stay on as subscribers).

If you are going create something for online reading, like a web-page or a PDF, then the body copy would perhaps be better as a sans-serif font like Arial.

Indented first line of every paragraph, with the exception of the first paragraph under a headline or a body subheading.

The main headline and any subheadings can be in a sans serif font. In this case it’s Helvetica, but Arial is another option. Do not go for fancy, cursive headlines the GD tells you is “eye catching”; and whatever you do, do NOT have patterned backgrounds or, worse, have a photo behind the copy.

You don’t want people “looking at” it… you want them reading it. Paintings, photos and sexy women are for looking at; ads, direct mail and marketing postcards are for reading.

The kicker (the copy below the headline) is serif and italics, which is fine, but tests show Helvetica and other sans-serif fonts are OK, too.

The thing to watch with headlines and any background images is too many bright colours.

There’s a balance to be made between eye-catching and comprehension. A bright-red, for instance, can be overwhelming and  keep distracting the eye to the point where it becomes impossible for some people to concentrate.

Generally I tend to stick to black, Navy blue (hex colour #23238E), or dark red (hex colour #990000). There’s also no punctuation at the end of the headline. This is deliberate.

You’ll notice we’re using three columns. That gives us around 38 characters per column, which is right in the middle of the preferred range (over 20 under 60). My own newsletter has two columns, at about 46 characters per column.

In Conclusion

The principles behind effective direct mail design are well understood, simple to grasp and astonishingly powerful.

You’ll also find your creative costs are a lot less, because you’re not paying the design and marketing agency, creative designers, and print design services for expensive creative services (and full colour ads!) you simply don’t need.

Finally… don’t take my word for any of this. It’s easy to test and measure in your next direct mailing campaign. If I’m wrong you won’t have lost anything and you’ll have learned something, too. But if I’m right, which science tells me I am… then you can look forward to a substantial boost in your profits.

You might not realise this yet, but direct mail response rates are perhaps the biggest and most misleading con in the whole direct marketing biz.

Why?

Well there are several reasons…  and many myths about response rates and direct mail statistics, most of which are perpetuated by canny and sometimes dishonest and downright sneaky providers of direct mail marketing services.

Direct mail response rates don’t matter

OK, let me be more accurate: they do matter, but not as much as you think they might and certainly not as much as some people would like you to believe.

Why don’t they matter?

Because getting “a response” is not difficult. I could send you a parcel of dead frogs in a dimensional direct mail package and while I might get a response, it’s unlikely to be a response I would actually like.

Two cases from the dim and distant past come to mind here.

First, a client planned a direct mail marketing campaign around a very poorly chosen list (against my explicit recommendation, I might add).

The list was 500 names long, and she got something like 30 responses. On the face of it, that’s not bad as direct mail response rates to cold lists go: 0.6%.

But the problem was the responses ranged from “don’t ever send me this crap again”, to much, much worse. Not the kind of thing to inspire confidence and get you brimming over with creative direct mail ideas for another bash at it, eh?

The second case was a chap I new who sent something like 15,000 pieces to an untested list. His response rate was around 2.8%, which is fantastic for a cold direct mail campaign. Any direct mail copywriter would be, on the face of it, be glad to get direct mail response rates like this.

Alas, all 430 of them were “goneaways” and the unpleasant “don’t ever send me this crap again” responses, just like the lady above.

A better measure than direct mail response rates

Is… conversion rate.

Or, in other words, how many of those responses ended up with the prospect taking the action you most wanted them to take, which can be anything from buying something, joining your mailing list, asking for some more information, calling a free number to listen to a message and leaving their details, or whatever you choose.

This might sound like mere semantics, but it’s not: many “gurus” and other industry “experts” will toss around direct mail response rates as an indicator of their greatness, and as you’re now beginning to appreciate, this ain’t necessarily so.

It’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask them “never mind your direct mail response rates… what was your conversion rate?”.

Don’t be surprised to get a frosty response to that.

But wait!

There’s more!

A EVEN better measure than direct mail conversion rates

Is your Return on Investment, or ROI.

What does this mean?

Simple: it’s the difference between the amount of money the direct mail campaign cost you and the amount of money it made you when all the dust has settled.

This is where it can get a bit tricky, and you have to do a bit of work.

Because the obvious thing to assume is the initial wave of cash coming in is all you’re going to get.

And while this may be true, if you’re being smart about things you’ll realise the ROI needs to take into account the long-term customer or client value. In other words, if you have a back-end sale in the pipeline or you’re in a business where you naturally get repeat sales, then you need to take this into account when figuring out your ROI.

From this it follows if you’re using direct mail for lead-generation, or you do have a funnel and a back-end, then you can typically afford to break-even or even lose money on the direct mail campaign, because you know the long-term customer value is going to put your ROI into the black over time.

Take it from me: while your direct mail response rate might not be completely irrelevant, it’s not as important or clear-cut as you might have thought.

Here are three free small business marketing tips you can get doing the ‘hard work ‘ for you in your marketing … and they won’t cost you a single penny.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips -- Fast and Easy, But They Won't Implement Themselves. In this short article, I share with you the easy way to put them to work for you.

That’s a huge promise, I know, but it’s one I stand by and mean to keep. But there is one warning: merely reading this piece and “knowing about” these tips won’t do a thing for you. You actually have to roll your sleeves up and put them to work for you.

But don’t let that put you off. Most marketing tips for the small business really are not that onerous or difficult to implement (and once you start seeing results, you’re going to be motivated to do even more of it).

These quick, easy and very, very simple tips for marketing your small business really could make the difference between success and failure for your business.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No 1: Raise your prices

Of all the free small business marketing tips I could ever give you, this is the quickest, easiest and most profitable.

There are perhaps 3 people in the whole world who always buy on price only (and you do not want them as customers anyway).

Every other person has more important things to bother with, like suitability, dependability, delivery time, excellence, value, support and all the rest. In one analysis only 14 % of participants said price was the most important factor for them; that means 86 % of them had other, more pressing concerns.

If you jack up your prices immediately, say by just 10 %, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll see no decrease in sales but you are going to see a substantial rise in revenues. Keep in mind, that extra 10 % is all profit, because the cost of your sale remains the same as it was. You might probably lose the odd client occasionally … but it’s unlikely, and even if you do, they’re the kind of customers and clients you can most likely do very well without.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No. 2: Cultivate referrals

Referred business is the most lucrative business to get, and the easiest to close the sale on — since all the hard work of cultivating trust has been done for you by whomever referred the business to you. In my own business, I don’t take on private clients from anything BUT referrals, because the business is such high quality. This is one of the very best marketing ideas for small business, and particularly for local small business marketing. It’s an essential component of our marketing mix.

Problem is, most of us don’t do anything to stimulate or encourage referrals. Like sunny days, we’re just happy when they come along.

Yet we can effortlessly turn this situation about by having a scheme of asking customers and clients one simple question: “whom do you know who requires the same kind of help I’ve just provided you?“. You could get on the phone and ask your top 20 % of customers that question today. This is one of the most powerful free small business marketing tips money can buy.

Better yet, we can even create our sales process so a customer agreeing to give us referrals is one of the conditions of doing business with us in the first place. You can say, in effect, “one of the preconditions of our doing business together is you recommend me to your people you know IF I do a fantastic job for you“.

This takes courage, but, believe me, it works.

Free Small Business Marketing Tips No. 3: Position yourself as an industry guru

One of the best advertising ideas for small businesses is to get yourself firmly emplaced as the local “expert”.

Look through any tabloid, local or national, and you’ll find “specialists” holding forth with opinions varied and diverse from haircuts and horticulture, and finance and fishtanks. Just who are these people and why does anybody concern themselves anything they say? Well, they’re simply just men and women much like you and I — entrepreneurs with specialist knowledge of their area of competence.

And the only difference is… they’re in the paper and you are not.

Why is this?

This is all a hell of a lot less trouble than it sounds and a lot less scary, too. Some years ago I had a monthly column in the local monthly publication. It boiled down to approximately 30 minutes’ effort a month to write up, and yielded thousands of Euro in business. It really is one of the top small business ideas, because while it can take a bit of time and perseverance, when it comes together, the payback is fast and HUGE.

So there you have it three free small business marketing tips you can set to work for you right away, they won’t cost you a dime to have a stab at all of them, and any one of them could give a substantial bump to your bottom line.

A small business marketing plan is essential for the long-term survival of any business. But the truth is, not  many business owners actually planned to be in the business they find themselves in, and once they were in it, paid scant attention to planning the future — including me. It’s often a case of us chasing a dream, doing something we like to do, rather than a reasonable and well considered small business marketing plan.

Small Business Marketing Plan - 3 Vital Steps

A typical error seems to be they presume if they’re good at doing the “thing”, then they can operate a “thing” business, too.

Sadly, this is typically not true. And the BIG problem is few people understand whatever business they assume they’re in, they’re truly in the marketing of the business they’re in. To put it otherwise, if you sell widgets, you’re not in the “widget business”: you’re in fact in the “marketing of a widget business business”. Otherwise, you’re really just working in a “job” where you are your own boss. And you end up working harder and making less.

So in this article we ‘ll look at what I’ve found in my long experience to be the 3 most important components of any effective small business marketing plan. And if you need help starting a small business, or are wondering how to market a small business or even how to make business plan, then this is article is going to make your day.

There is a lot more, to be sure, but if you can get the knack of these 3, then this alone is going to put you head and shoulders above your competitors.

Small business marketing plan step 1. Your Raison d’Etre

Why does your business exist?

If you responded anything other than “to make money”, then you might want to think again about your career.

This is not a money-grubbing attitude to take. No matter what the eventual aim of your business, it’s got to pay its own way so it can meet salary, pay its bills and keep up with its commitments.

All of this means you’ve got to be making sales — and this does have to be your target. This is why a small business marketing plan is so vital: it gives you something to aim for and measure against.

What’s more, this is no way contradicts what I say below about fostering long-term relationships rather than focusing on immediate sales. Quite the reverse, because, by serving rather than selling, you ‘ll end up selling MORE over the long term.

What is does NOT mean, though, is fixating on each prospect or customer as if he or she was the last one you were ever going to get. That’s the quick way to the nut-house, and you don’t make any extra sales while you’re on your way there, either.

Yes, you have to make sales and you have to have customers and clients … but no single one of them is indispensable. If they are, then your business is in a very precarious position and you need to do something about, and soon.

Small business marketing plan step 2. Serve, not sell

The very first sale you make to a customer or client is often insignificant in monetary terms because the real value is always going to be in the following sales you make. The lifetime client value, in other words. Even if you’re in a tiny corner store with lots of pass-through traffic, you will still have your regulars. These are the people your small business marketing plan must focus on.

Not many business owners truly understand this, and needlessly waste a lot of time and effort chasing fresh business without properly cultivating and nurturing the relationships with the customers they currently have.

In my experience, it’s often held true I make more money in my relationship with a client in the long term by talking them out of an early and to my mind unsuitable purchase. And any small business marketing plan must be looking at the long term, not just expediency.

Small business marketing plan step 3. Follow up till they plead for mercy

The most successful entrepreneurs know the key to success in business is tenacious follow-up.

In other words, the more you tell, the more you sell.

Your prospects of selling something to someone on the first pass are commonly pretty slender, and even in my business, which is in an industry not usually noted for its long sales cycle, I frequently get first-time buyers who have been on my email list for (literally) years and have only at that moment decided to buy.

So the first part of your small business marketing plan must be to ensure you a follow-up system in place, and preferably have it comprise email, direct mail, and even faxes and voice calls.

Running a prosperous small business isn’t difficult and these 3 highly effective tips for a sensible small business marketing plan will go a long way making it happen for you.

Back to Small Business Strategy For Serious Business Owners Who Want To Be Rich

Back to top of Small Business Marketing Plan – Three Easy Steps to Small Business Success

The marketing mix was first described by Neil Borden in 1953, but what most business owners don’t realise is this idea of Borden’s was just a rehash of a previous idea by his colleague, James Culliton, some five years previously.

And then in 1960 E. Jerome McCarthy distilled the marketing mix down to the “f0ur P’s”: price, product, place, promotion. While all four of these are important, I maintain the most important of them by far is promotion.

The reason I say this is price, and product can frequently be repositioned in the buyer’s mind by effective marketing, and, similarly, the location can be made unimportant.

So in this post, when we talk about the marketing mix, we’re really focusing on the different channels of marketing our products and services to our prospects.

A rich marketing mix is essential if you want your business to be on safe ground in any marketplace

But the vast majority of business owners are not using an effective marketing mix.

Marketing Mix - Essential for a Strong Foundation for Your Business

In fact, most businesses, at best, are focusing on just one or two forms of marketing.

But is this really so bad?

I mean, if you have discovered one or two forms of marketing that are working for you, then… all is good, right?

Well yes, all is ok… at least… for now.

But… what are you going to do if the two forms of marketing that are currently working for your business all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, just stop working?

Tomorrow, the ad you are running in the daily rag may, for whatever reason, stop pulling a profitable response, your Google Adwords account may get shut down, your website may get hacked or your postal service goes on strike and your direct mail gets lost, etc.

I am not trying to be pessimistic here, but I’ve seen this happen in real life. A few years back when fax marketing was to all intents and  purposes made illegal, one fellow’s business was left dead in the water – no marketing mix, you see. Around the same time, a lady I knew, whose business revolved solely around her Facebook list was left high and dry when her account was pulled.

Bottom line: if you are keeping all your eggs in one basket, then you’re not only asking for trouble, you are leaving the majority of the market open for your competitors to quietly corner the market, right under your nose!

Use an effective marketing mix to attract people who are currently slipping under your radar

The fact is…

Not all your prospective customers and clients will be found through one or two channels – that is the method you use to make yourself visible to your market, e.g. direct mail, classified ads, TV slots, SEO and PPC, etc – in fact, I can guarantee you are targeting only a tiny fraction of the total market if you are not extending your reach over several different channels and then using multiple media within those channels. In other words, you should be using a rich and robust marketing mix.

And by media, I mean how you are communicating with your prospects through each channel…

For example; in direct mail you could be using mediums such as letters, CDs and DVDs and on the Internet you could be using mediums such as webinar, video, and online sales letters.

See, everybody responds differently to different types of media. Some people will respond better to one medium than another. For example; you may find some prospects will respond better to a video sales letter than a written one, whilst others find video annoying and prefer to read… and vice versa.

The Ideal Marketing Mix

For your marketing to be as effective as possible you need to be targeting your niche crowd using all the available channels available and with multiple media through each channel, then testing to see what is working, and what isn’t. Once you know what’s working, then you can tweak the good stuff to and optimise your marketing mix to supply your business with optimum results.

This may all seem complicated and sound like a lot of work, at the minute. But soon you will realise just how fun the marketing game is…

Enjoy playing the detective to find the hot buttons of your targeted audience, playing the strategist when plotting the words, colours and designs you use in your messages…

… and then, play the scientist when testing and measuring to predictably grow your business to any level you desire!

Once you’ve got your marketing mix tuned in to the market, the world, as they sat, is the bivalve of your choice.