Direct Mail campaigns have many barriers to being profitable.

You have to choose the right prospects, at around 35p+ per mail you don’t want to send to uninterested people.

You have to hope it gets there. 14.4 Million pieces of mail were lost or posted through the wrong letterbox in 2007. So say goodbye to at least 1% of your mailed out letters.

And you have to hope that your mail gets opened. There are many visual clues that indicate your mail is a sales letter (or as the customer will call it… spam!) and it then goes straight to the bin.

Then once it’s open it’s got to sell! My sums are showing that at 50p per mail we’ll need to have a 0.5% close rate to break even. Beginning with a test batch of 500 we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be changing the variables to see what makes a good sales letter and will report back my findings.

One of the main things I’m interested in trying out is novelty stamps or international stamps. Something that costs around the same price but gives it such a flair you open the letter out of curiosity. I never throw away a letter with a USA airmail stamp because it might be something from my Aunt in the US – I’m a 100% open rate customer when there’s a US stamp involved!

Whether it increases profit or not I’ll be respecting my customers by using a 1st class stamp to ensure, at the least, a quick delivery. I’ll just be using 2nd class to pay my bills.