Direct Mail Campaign – mistakes make learning opportunities

This is a true story. Some years ago a client engaged a consultant to help with a small postal mailing to the purchasing departments of blue chip corporations. The consultant sourced the list (which was provided on MSExcel) and drafted the letter. Thereafter the client was keen to take control of the project, ie., to run the mail-merge and the fulfillment (basically printing, envelope-stuffing and mailing).

The consultant discovered some weeks later that a junior member of the client’s marketing department had sorted the list (changed the order of the listed organisations in the spreadsheet), but had sorted the company name column only, instead of all columns, with the result that every letter (about 500) was addressed and sent to a blue-chip corporation at another entirely different corporation’s address.

Interestingly the mailing produced a particularly high response, which when investigated seemed to stem from the fact that an unusually high percentage of letters were opened and read, due apparently to the irresistible temptation of reading another corporation’s mail…

I have to give credit for this story to Businessballs.

I remember in my first marketing job we were conducting over 7 large-scale direct mail campaigns per month totaling over a million letters a month. One time we had a mailing that was scheduled to go out in January. A mistake was made and instead, it went out between Christmas and New Year – when everyone would be home and busy enjoying the festivities – surely too preoccupied to take the time to read and respond to our direct mail? But this was not the case, it was one of the most successful campaigns we ran. There was only one drawback – Christmas only comes once a year so it was a strategy we could only use once a year, not every month.

Julian