Categories: Direct Mail Production

The culture of your organization will largely determine the forward progress of a more expensive data-driven direct mail campaign. The initiative could be either a top-down, program-driven effort or a team-driven collaboration. Regardless, the driving force will stem from a need to boost performance -- of an individual campaign, a specific marketing program, the work of one or more departments, or the progress of the organization as a whole.

Final decisions may fall to the designated manager, but such projects benefit from collaborative input from creative, marketing, database and production players. Many organizations have separated the players and managed to iron out the kinks in working independently to execute traditional marketing campaigns. Still, the “siloed” approach will need to be unlearned to a degree.

Managers should invite the following stakeholders and key participants to contribute during conceptualization and project planning. This increases the odds of success and allows all to take ownership of the result.

• Upper Management: Approves projects, gives budget authorization, and will rely on ROI as a measure of success.
• The Marketing Team: Initiates one-to-one mail within a marketing program, ensures schedules and project completion milestones are met, monitors and measures results, and assesses projects for continual performance improvement.
• Production Manager: Develops package specs based on the goals of the campaign, coordinates with internal parties to achieve an understanding of project requirements, and employs vendors to complete the project.
• IT and Database Team: Provides information about available data, sets up the database to receive new data, and provides mailing list data.
• Creative Team: Designs the direct mail package; writes or places the copy; plans for variable within the creative; determines rules to ensure all data-driven values will work within the creative piece.

  A Guide to One-to-One Direct Mail Marketing
  A comprehensive look at executing a targeted Direct Mail campaign.

• Related Departments: May undertake or plan other marketing, advertising, or promotional projects in conjunction with the direct mail effort.

What other steps should be included in preparing a successful targeted campaign? Download the resource,  Tailoring Your Messages:A Guide to One-to-One Direct Mail Marketing to find out more.