If you’re not having much luck with marketing your A4 portrait brochures and other PR material, it might be because you simply don’t yet know when your target market is most likely to respond to your messages.
Writing for Entrepreneur, author and owner of Simpson Direct Craig Simpson explained that you need to think about your customers and what they might be doing at certain times of the year. He gave the example of sending letters out to farmers about commodities like corn, wheat and sugar, and finding out that this target market was not response during the harvest season.
This is because they are out there working 20 hours a day, seven days a week – and they simply don’t have the time to read their post or find out about something new. In the off season, however, this demographic was found to be highly responsive to messages.
“By mailing at just the right times, we are able to make the most out of our mailing. Experiment with small mailings and compare responses over time. Armed with information on the best times to mail, you can make the best use of your advertising budget,” Mr Simpson went on to say.
If you’re still new to direct marketing and aren’t sure you’re doing it right, why don’t you limit it to smaller numbers until you know you’ve cracked the formula? This will mean you’re not wasting time and energy, and that you’re not throwing money away on people who simply won’t respond just because you’ve got the time of year wrong.