How to slide into DM (direct mail)

Direct mail is getting more popular again, for a few reasons:

• Marketers are returning to the office after COVID (including some who are returning voluntarily!)
• AI is making it more possible to send garbage at scale via email and social media (it’s also making it possible to send more good stuff too, I am told, so if anyone can point me to even a single example, I’d like to see it)
• We had a short period where you might get laughed at if you suggested DM as a channel, but everything is getting harder and harder, so people are willing to give new things (or old things) a go.

So, if you want to send something through the post, here’s what you need to know to do it well:

1. Send it to the right person. If you’re advertising lead generation activities - and you send something to someone who isn’t in charge of lead generation - then it’s really clear that you’re not good at the thing you’re selling. This seems really obvious, but I’ve seen it done wrong a bunch of times. This is one of the reasons to build prospecting lists, like I wrote about a few weeks ago: if you spend some time following your prospects’ social media; seeing what they post and what they engage with; you’ll have a higher degree of certainty about what they’re passionate about and/or responsible for.
2. If you’re going to send something to someone’s home address, you should actually know that person…and you should ask permission. Think about how you’d react if an agency you don’t know had something delivered to your house…again, I feel like this is obvious?
3. Don’t throw their team under the bus. For a brand-side marketer, having your boss forward you a SEMrush report saying you’re doing a poor job is quite annoying; being handed something that, unlike a SEMrush report, someone has spent some time on, provokes a much more visceral reaction. It’s more likely to be left laying around the office for other people to find as well, which is a good thing if it’s a good thing, or a bad thing if it’s critical of the team.
4. On that subject, you get out what you put in. Most of the attraction to DM is that it takes a bit more effort than an email (especially an automated one): if you create something generic and send it to everyone without any personalisation, it’s probably going in the bin. If you create something bespoke that, if you stopped and thought about it for a second, you’d agree is worth keeping on the desk for a while, that’s where it’ll stay. The more useful/entertaining/beautiful something is, the more likely it is that you’ll get a response.
   I’m actually not opposed to a short, snappy message if it’s arriving in the prospect’s LinkedIn or email inboxes (almost as straightforward as “hi, we do [relevant service] for [relevant brands], here’s a [relevant thing]. Let me know if you’d find a chat about [relevant problems] helpful”…something like that can work via direct mail in, for example, a handwritten note.
5. Know what you want the response to be. This is a direct response channel, where you can say something specific to someone specific and aim for a specific response to come back (more so even than highly targeted social ads)…what is that response going to be? If your mail doesn’t ask for a specific action, you’re probably not going to get a specific action.

A case study

When Rise at Seven was a few weeks old (and the pandemic was still a couple of months away), we sent ~10 perspex boxes full of sweets to brands we wanted to work with. Each box had a small padlock that required a code to open it…and we placed a note, visible at the top of the box, that said they needed to email us to get the code.

I grabbed this image from eComOne's Carrianne Dukes who shared it on LinkedIn not long ago.

That’s it. We thought:

• Nobody is going to be upset to get sweets (and they can share among the team: see point 3, be nice to the team…even the most junior marketer can derail your deal)
• We can get a dialogue going (on email) with some brands we would aspire to work with
• It’s not going to break the bank for an agency that had been trading for less than a month
• Some of the people who received one might post it on social media (they did). The evil tech corporations do a great job of this, by the way (which I wrote about in when I covered our client gifting strategy): do you really want a Google-branded refrigerator? Or do you want to post on social media that you’ve got one, inducing FOMO and inspiring others to spend more with Google so that they too can receive a thing they don’t actually want or need?

Fiona Proudler, one of my first bosses, was the absolute best at this: when I left Kin + Carta, where we worked together, to lead digital at Pendragon PLC (which would, I assume, make me an ICP for Fiona’s agency Realise), she sent me a personalised cushion from Not on the High Street, which read “love from Edinburgh to Nottingham”. It was a nice cushion. It showed she knew some details about my move (i.e. that I was going from Leeds to Nottingham). It reinforced that connection between Realise and Edinburgh, where I had some happy memories (Rise at Seven could have decided to become absolutely synonymous with Sheffield in the same way, for example). It made me think of her and Realise fairly frequently. Later, at Rise, I was fortunate enough to hire Fiona for a little while. So, I would say, it did the job.