Why didn't my direct marketing leaflet work?

I often hear the classic “I’ve spent all my budget on the print, and the printer has offered to design the flyer for free”, and the follow up a few weeks later with the immortal “direct marketing is a waste of money, I got zero response”.

After counting to ten, I sometimes ask what actually sells the product/service they were offering – the number of flyers that were delivered, or the content of the flyer itself. As naive as this may seem, many startups think it’s best to send a cheap communication to 10,000 households than an effective one to 1,000.

It comes down to a lack of focus.

Whatever your proposition, it must appeal to the recipient. Put yourself in the place of the person finding the flyer on their doormat – would you read this or would it not touch the ground until it reaches the recycling?

You must consider the message itself; it must offer something attractive to the recipient; it must engage them and make them want to respond; it must appeal both visually and stand out amongst the perceived ‘junk mail’.

Invest in good design, invest in good copywriting. I advise my clients to match their spend on production (be it print or advertising) with spend on the content. You would be better to cut corners on the numbers produced or even the quality of stock than the quality of the message itself.

That isn’t to say that all print and press in-house design is poor, far from it, but not all of them hire trained design staff... if they did, they couldn’t afford to offer it for free and still pay their wages.

...and you already know my thoughts on free design. It’s not free because of the designer’s sense of charity, it's most often because it simply isn’t good enough to charge for.

Now I have my design. How do I know if it is effective?

No matter what form of advertising or marketing you use, it’s pointless without knowing if it was effective in terms of your return on investment.

A number of simple systems can be employed to measure your results, such as directing the recipient to a specific web page or domain, by having them call a specific number, or offering a discount code that must be quoted. Record your results, tot-up the number of enquiries and conversions to orders, and compare with your initial outlay. Really, really simple.