So much of direct mail success is knowing and understanding your audience, and the rest is execution.

It is expensive to mail a printed piece to a huge audience, so if the mailing is executed improperly, the failures can be spectacular. But direct marketing is very easy to manage. You can target your recipients, check the leads yourself and follow up easily. Success is easy to quantify.

So the advantages of direct mail are many, and you can use it to accomplish numerous things. The most important is to generate qualified sales leads that can lead to a very high percentage of conversion. You can also use it to build your database or use it as a “teaser”—that is, to set the stage for a follow-up phone call or a visit from your sales rep.

There are five critical elements to any direct mail campaign:

1. Your list.

This can be your in-house list or a purchased list. A number of companies, including many trade publications, supply excellent lists. They give you the opportunity to select the names according to the demographics you choose.

2. The desirability of the product.

If your product is not interesting or desirable, you have a big challenge. This problem can be partially overcome by superior creative execution and a good offer, but there’s only so much you can do. You might want to invest in R&D first.

3. The offer.

With any direct marketing effort, always make an offer. Without “something in it for me,” people will not respond. But don’t just give stuff away. Make them respond to receive the offer. Your reply card or other response mechanism should include something like:

Have my (XYZ company) sales representative contact me. I understand that when the sales rep comes to visit, he/she will bring my FREE (giveaway).

4. Creative execution.

Obviously, if nobody opens your envelope (or email), you’ve failed. And once you get them to open it, make sure you explain clearly why the recipient can’t do without your product, and communicate your offer clearly. Above all, make it easy for them to respond. I strongly suggest having a direct marketing professional help with your creative.

5. Follow up.

I’ve seen companies commit the time and expense into a direct mail campaign, generate a whole bunch of leads and then fail to follow up on any of them. I think this is inexcusable. Get the leads—and the giveaways if you are using them—to the person who will be following up immediately. If they ask for literature, send the literature right away. If you encourage them to go to your website, be sure the payoff— whatever it may be—is on the website, and it’s easy to find. Or give them a phone call—whatever it takes.

If you fall short in any of these areas, you can just about forget about success in your campaign. Please, don’t do this. The best case is that it is a big waste of money. The worst case is that you generate leads for your competitors.

Who you’re marketing to dictates how you do it.

This is where knowing your audience and a little common sense come in.

For example, is using the Internet to market to engineers a good idea? Absolutely. Engineers love their computers and the Internet. After all, they are the original “techno-geeks.”

Opt-in emails are great for engineers. Opt-in email is also a very cost-effective, contemporary method of direct marketing. You can buy a list, specify the engineers who have indicated that they are interested in receiving information on the type of products you sell, and the company from which you buy the list will handle the “blast.”

GlobalSpec estimates that 655,000 engineers are registered on their site, www.globalspec.com [ http://www.globalspec.com/ ]. So there is a huge, willing audience for technical information via the Internet.

What about using the Internet to market to doctors? Quite possibly. It’s safe to assume that any doctor who is involved in research uses the Internet extensively and thus, a prime candidate. But there are probably just as many who never even check email.

Direct mail is probably not the best medium to reach your audience if it’s a large one. Printing and postage for a large mailing are expensive. You have to decide what your cutoff point is.

But for the right audience and the right size of audience, it’s absolutely great. Beckman Instruments, where I worked for ten years, is a perfect example. Beckman makes medical instruments, and their primary audience is hospital lab managers. There are only so many of them in the whole country. And if you eliminate the smaller hospitals by bed size, you get a perfect-sized audience for direct mail—3,000 to 5,000. We invested a lot of money on four-color, glossy, creative direct mail pieces. But that investment paled in comparison to the return.

Obviously, the smaller the quantity, the more you can do. I’ve even heard of companies mailing expensive bottles of wine to a few key customers and prospects. A real eye-opener, I’m sure.

For large, technically oriented audiences, at least for your first wave, opt-in email is the way to go.

Jon Garner is a creative director, copywriter and strategist with over fifteen years of direct marketing experience. Request a free example of a successful opt-in email by sending an email to jon@garnerads.com . Further examples of his direct mail campaigns are found on his website, www.garnerads.com.