Direct Mail Ideas and Examples

Get inspired! See industry award-winning direct mail campaigns and learn about innovations like adding sound and video; personalizing direct mail postcards and brochures with someone's name and relevant photos and text; self-publishing a magazine or a book. And innovations in color office printers that allow you to print for six cents per page!

What's new and interesting in direct mail marketing?

Talking, singing and video direct mail brochures
- Technology now allows you to add sound and video to direct mail.
- Learn and see/hear examples of how this work and what it costs at MailPow, a company that specializes in this new technology.
Personalized direct mail postcards and mailers with someone's name and other photos and text that make the direct mail more relevant
- This is enabled through new printing technology that the printing industry refers to as VDP (variable data printing) or digital printing.
- A commercial printer with a digital press and expertise in this type of specialized printing technique can work with you to create different versions of brochures or booklets for different groups of customers or prospects. Learn more about Digital Printing.
- Response rates for direct mail are typically much higher when mailers are personalized but the cost per piece also increases. You'll want to do the math to determine if this is a good option for you.

Self publishing a Book
- Digital printing is also the catalyst behind self publishing books and custom magazines. Digital printing equipment allows for short runs (fewer number of printed pieces) with the quality of
- How to Self Publish a Book

How to Create and Publish a Magazine
- Wow is this cool! Innovations in printing technology now allow you to create and print small quantities of a full color professionally looking magazine for your product, business or company inexpensively. You can pay to have the magazine printed once you've been paid by a subscriber or order as many as you need and then have more printed only if you need them. You can make your magazine self-funding if you choose to sell ads or split the cost with non competitors to share the cost.
- This is a great way to look like an expert to clients and customers. You can use your magazine as a business development tool to send to prospective customers and use it to reinforce your leadership and cross-sell relevant products/services to your existing customers. Follow our steps to create and print your own magazine. Get tips on graphic design, costs and tips to save money creating and printing a magazine.

How to Create and Print Booklets - not as impressive as a book certainly but perhaps a booklet is all you need. You can print booklets on your office printer.

eBooks
- These are popular and easy to do. You want a great looking cover and we can help you with understanding your options for how to create eBooks.

Printing direct mail on your color office printer
- Color printers aren't what they used to be. Now that they're designed to print color photos that look as if they came from a photo lab, the print quality is good enough to also be used to print marketing and sales brochures, flyers, presentations, invitations and more. You'll save a lot of money doing this (even if you have to buy a new color printer).
  
  TIP: The real way to save money is to print it yourself on a high-quality color office printer
  
  The cost per print can be as low as six cents per color page, significantly lower than sending a printing job out. And with the new color printers, the print quality will look the same. So the trade-off is your time to print it yourself. This article covers what you need to know if you choose to do it yourself and how to get your printing costs down to the six cent range.

Get inspired with ideas and examples from Award Winning Direct Mail campaigns

Industry award winners

Large companies, non-profit organizations and their agencies nominate their direct mail campaigns for these awards. It may be helpful to look at these campaigns to gather ideas you can use for yours.

The Echo Awards are run by the Direct Marketing Association. What's unique about these awards is that the direct marketing campaigns are evaluated on strategy, creativity and results. Most marketing and advertising awards are won based on a panel of industry experts using their judgment to determine what they think is best. These awards are won (in part) because of the nominees sharing their quantified results. Awards are given for different categories and industries. The agencies who created the campaigns, along with the client and product or service, are listed.

Know this: The DMA shows small photos of the award-winning campaigns (too small really to be useful). They charge several hundred dollars a year for access to see the campaigns and case study information for all the entries. This is a worthwhile expense for an agency but not for a small business owner. You can use this site to research who the award winners are for your industry and then go to the agency site who created the campaign to see if they've posted it on their site (agencies usually do this to brag about the Echo win).

Clio Award Winners for Direct Mail. The Clios are a prestigious marketing and advertising international industry award program. Winners are chosen by a panel of industry experts. The website for the Clios allows you to click on and see a photo of the award winner and gives details on the campaign. It's free to look at these examples.

Effie Awards are based on "ideas that work." Companies and agencies nominating their marketing must demonstrate results and that the idea worked. The site is free, and you can search for campaigns by industry and year. They list the company and agency that created the campaign and then show a summary page about the campaign including visuals.

The Cannes Awards are international awards for advertising and marketing. There are lots of examples of winning campaigns and direct marketing to see on their website. Awards are chosen by a panel of industry professionals.

The Addy Awards are orchestrated by the American Advertising Federation. There are more than 60,000 entries annually. Awards are given for different types of advertising as well as for logos, annual reports, marketing collateral, direct marketing and several other categories.

More examples of direct mail to get ideas for your small business campaign

Most agencies and freelancers post examples of their direct mail campaigns on their websites
- Wunderman is one of the largest direct mail agencies in the world. Their site showcases examples of the direct mail campaigns they've developed for their clients. They work for large companies but their campaigns will have ideas you can leverage for yours.
- Ogilvy & Mather is another large agency that is well known for their advertising and direct mail for large companies. Their site showcases campaigns they've developed.

The large catalog companies are experts in direct mail marketing. Look at what they do for inspiration.

Commercial printers that specialize in what's called digital printing or personalized printing
- This is a technique where direct mail is personalized to an individual or segment of customers. It's done using special digital press equipment and computer database and list feeds that allow a commercial printer to personalize direct mail with someone's name, different photos and text to be more relevant. This technique is more expensive and difficult to plan and create but the response rates are reported to be much higher than traditional direct mail. It's the equivalent of sending a generic resume to every employer versus spending the time to tailor a resume to an individual employer. Learn more about personalized direct mail.

Online companies that sell templates post a lot of examples you can look through
- Top Suppliers for marketing templates

Do a Google search for images of direct mail ideas
- include your type of business or industry to see more relevant examples

See the advice given by the MarketingZone community on the tabs on this page. Members can include website links on their profile pages. Click through to visit their website to see examples of their work.

Know this: Direct mail works because of a combination of a great offer, sent to the right people (great list), at the right time, with the right words (called copy in the industry), and graphic design. It's not one thing, it's the combination that's important in direct mail marketing success. The typical response rate for direct mail is 1-2%. How to increase your direct mail response rates.

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Direct Mail Ideas and Examples