A lot of people are grumbling about the postal rates going up, but if you’re a savvy marketer, you’ll look at this rise in rates as an opportunity to make money.
If you’re only an online marketer, then this won’t apply to you, but if you use direct mail (and you should be) to sell any of your products or services, then you should be thanking the postal service for reducing your competition.
You see, most direct mailers will have a knee jerk reaction to postal rates going up and in order to save money, will cut back on how much or how often they’re mailing their letters.
Many others mailed a bunch of mail right before the rates went up so they could get one last promotion sent out. If you were paying attention the week before May, 14 2007, you probably noticed you were getting a larger amount of direct mail advertisements than normal.
What you, the smart direct marketer, should be doing is start sending out more direct mail pieces. You’ll notice there’s less noise – I wish I’d have actually taken the time to look at figure out exactly how much more mail I received the week right before the rates went up then the week immediately following, but my unscientific analysis says that there was a lot more arriving the week before rates went up.
This is good for you since there is less mail being sent out, hence you’ll have less clutter to cut through to get your mail opened up and responded to. Give it a try and notice how you’ll get a measurable boost to your response rates.
And keep this strategy in mind the next time rates go up (and they will).
Take advantage of less competition and you’ll notice that the better response you get more than makes up for the slightly higher cost of mailing the promotion out.
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