Using Promotional Products to Boost your Direct Mail Campaign

Mini Screen Cleaner Pads- a great direct mail compliment.

Direct mail can be a highly effective way to advertisie your company.  It's highly targeted and can reach your target audience at work or at home.  Direct mail allows for lots of potential creativity, and it has the ability to communicate lots of information.  Another plus is that it's sucess rate is very measurable.  So what can you do to give your mail campaign the boost it needs to initiate a response from the recipients?  The answer lies in the diverse world of promotional products.

Promotional products are any item imprinted with a company's logo or other artwork.  Using promotional products as part of your direct mail campaign is a surefire way to ensure your campaign is a successful one.  You can use promotional products as part of your direct mail campaign in one of two ways.

First, you can use a promotional product as an incentive to respond to your direct mail piece.  You can offer a promotional product as a prize for the first several responders.  Or, you can give out a particular promotional item to anyone that purchases your product or survice, or signs up for your newsletter, or whatever other action you wish the recipient to take.  Another great use for promotional products as part of your direct mail campaign is a pre-tradeshow incentive.  Send out postcards before a trade show and tell the recipient to bring the card to your booth to receive a cool prize.  Using a promotional product as an incentive to respond leads to a response rate that is four times higher than sending a letter alone.

The second way to use promotional products as part of a successful direct mail campaign is to actually send the promotional product along with the direct mail piece.  Of course, this does limit the type of promotional product you can use for a typical campaign.  You can't stuff a water bottle into an envelope, for example.  There are, however, many effective promotional products that can easily fit into an envelope to go along with your direct mail piece.  "Lumpy mail" has a much higher open rate than flat mail, because people are curious by nature and want to know what's inside.  Because of this, including a promotional product with your direct mail piece increases the response rate by 50% on average and thus reduces the cost per response.

So as you can see, using promotional products as part of your direct mail campaign will definitely lead to a higher success rate.  It just makes sense from a marketing standpoint.  For ideas on effective ways to pair promotional products with direct mail, Red Canoe Promotions can help.