Direct Mail for Your (Private) School?
Does it feel like Direct Mail a big hole in your budget? How do you even know if it works? Can’t we just use online marketing to do the same thing?
Like many of you, I have been very skeptical about the long term opportunities for print marketing. I have forsaken general newspaper advertising and have given up on the phonebook. But Direct Mail continues to be a part of my marketing plans. This post will dissect the current campaign that I am running and discuss what I believe are some essentials to an effective campaign.
Numbers First
The ultimate goal of any campaign is to get families in the door. Every campaign must be judged by how many people contact the school or attend an event. Without these numbers, all of our marketing is without merit. The frustration is that even with these numbers, we are not always certain about which part of our marketing brings people in the door.
A second method for evaluating a direct mail campaign is your website statistics. Below I have two views from Google Analytics about my website to the value of a direct mail piece.
In the first view, you see the last couple of months of data about visits to my website. On December 1st, we updated the design of our website, and had a lot of visits that day. The last day of the chart is the day that my direct mail piece went home. You can see that we had more visits than average on that day. But a better evaluation tool is below, it measures page views.
Generally speaking, prospective families will wander about your website and view a lot of different pages. In this second view, you see how our page views were very high on the day that people received the direct mail piece. I would say that this direct mail piece would be evaluated as very effective at driving people to learn more about our school through our website.
So What Makes a Good Campaign?
Here are my three things I believe are essential to a good direct mail campaign?
- Have a Purpose – I would always have a purpose to my campaign. For my school, Direct Mail is too expensive to send on a monthly basis. In the campaign, I was focused on an Open House that we are having in February. The purpose also included a call to action. I wanted people to d know that we want them to call the school or visit our website.
- Have a Great List – Direct mail companies should be evaluated by their ability to get your mail to the people who might enroll their children. The campaign was focused on this grouping:
- People who have children between the ages of 3 and 13 (I work at a Pre-K through 8th Grade School)
- Households with a combined income of $40,000 (We have very low tuition)
- Households within driving distance of our school (Don’t be scared to venture out of your town, we all have people who drive 30 minutes to school)
- Households who eat pizza once a week (just a joke)
Don’t be timid when working with these companies, they sometimes will try to upsell you a bigger list than you need. Remember that each name will cost you at least 20 cents to send the mail.
- Have a Great Design – The design of a direct mail piece has to stand out. It has to catch people’s attention when they receive it in the mail. We all know that the majority of this stuff is thrown away, so you must have something that will attract the eye, and keep your piece out of file #13. The next two pictures show the piece that we sent.
Waiting for the Results
As we wait to evaluate the end result of the direct mail piece, I continue to see the value in targeted Direct Mail for our school, even in tight budgetary times. If we reach just one family with our mail, then we will have provided double the income than the expenses that we incurred in producing and mailing this piece.
