The biggest challenge that I face in direct mail is getting the recipient to open the envelope and read the offer. For instance, if I signed up a car dealership to do a 10,000 piece mailer with a 50% discount on everything in stock, this weekend only, and only a handful of customers showed up, I could reasonably conclude that the mailer either had a really weak open rate or the offer wasn’t aggressive enough.
I could also reasonably conclude that if the offer had nearly a 100% open rate (if almost all the 10,000 were opened and read) that the dealership would have been flooded with thousands of shoppers looking for the 50% discount!
In most cases, the problem isn’t the offer – it’s the packaging.
I’ve done some lengthy research as to why good automotive direct mail pieces don’t seem to draw the crowds it used to. I’ve narrowed it down to a few factors that I’ll post about later, but today I want to tell you what I see as the numero uno problema (number one problem).
If everyone else is remotely close to the way I am when I look at my mail, then they subconsciously split their mail into two major categories: Important and Junk.
Important includes: bills (utilities, mortgage, credit cards, car loans etc.), and personal (birthday cards, Netflix, family, church, etc.). There’s more, but I think you get the point.
Junk includes: not bills or personal (Important), furniture store ads, cable ads, unsolicited advertising (mortgage, auto, and the new Chinese restaurant down the road), carpet cleaners and things of the like.
There is certainly a division of mail into these two categories with two different reactions. One I open and read, and the other I don’t (at least not immediately).
So, the trick is to get automotive direct mail offers out of the Junk category and into the Important category. If I can accomplish that, then I can provide my dealers with direct mail pieces that are certainly worth the money they’ll pay me for it!
Packaging counts, because most folks like me give the mail a quick visual scan and judge in a split second which category it falls into. I think that knowing this and solving this is the reason that we rock so hard with the dealers we work with.
-JG
HILL MARKETING GROUP 