Article re-posted from Overnight Prints.
By Mark Haslan
A new blog post by a senior copywriter said that a design for a piece of direct mail, whether it be a great letterhead or a well designed postcard, may be key in grabbing the attention of a customer.
Cynthia Fedor, a senior copywriter at QuantumDigital, said in writing for The Direct Marketing Voice that while there is no magic formula or 100 percent guarantee, a company must know its target audience and determine an end goal for a campaign. She writes, as an example, that a real estate agent sending a postcard to potential home buyers should separate the recipients into different groups that would speak to their separate issues.
"What is the intended outcome of the piece?" Fedor asks, adding that whatever the message is, there should only be one main idea represented in each piece of direct mail. Fedor said that in writing a piece of direct mail, a company should make a great headline, giving the reader the reason why they are viewing the mail. She compared this to a newspaper headline, designed to give a short summary of important information.
An entry on Marketing-ideas.org agrees with Fedor, writing that the most pertinent information should be featured at the top of the letter. The site said writing good copy for direct mail should be somewhat like writing a letter to a friend; you can use colloquialisms, sentence fragments and other methods to seem friendly. As Fedor said, the important factor will be knowing which audience is being written to.