As a follow up to yesterday’s post about marketing and dating, here’s another argument for being more targeted in your marketing, in this case, with your direct mail…

Time and again we copywriters run into clients who choose the quantity over quality approach to marketing via direct mail. They’d rather spend the same money to send out a lot of boring, likely-to-be-tossed-right-away direct mail pieces than to spend the same amount of money on far fewer but much more impactful pieces.

It’s like shooting a bunch of arrows into the sky hoping one will hit a target vs. taking careful aim with one arrow and shooting straight at the target.

If you can spend $25 a pop to create, produce and mail a killer package to 100 C level executives that are your ideal prospects, for a total cost of $2500, why would you instead choose to spend that same amount of money to mail a plain postcard (OK, maybe it’s over-sized) to 1250 people who either won’t notice or even get the postcard? Seems silly, but that’s the route so many marketers take, I guess reasoning they are getting more bang for their marketing bucks because they are spending less per piece…

I ran into this with a copywriting client a few years ago who confessed that winning one customer from a direct mail campaign would equal $15,000 a month in revenue. But that company was unwilling to page for a campaign that would have cost just $1,500 because the cost per package was so high ($15), never mind that it was so targeted and likely to get noticed too.

If—after reading this blog post--you’re rethinking your quantity over quality approach to direct mail and seek inspirational, unique ideas, I highly recommend “Design for Response: Creative direct marketing that works” by Leslie H. Sherr and David J. Katz. I just got a copy and love it so much, I’m keeping it on my coffee table for now.