Leave your direct mail preconceptions at the door

I was talking to a fundraising manager at a tiny charity recently and, while she had been in the sector for a number of years, she was surprised to hear that cold direct mail still existed. This was mainly because she never receives it. However, she was under 30, and had also moved a lot, so I explained that a) she wouldn’t be the usual target audience for charities and b) she would be pretty hard to find on a file due to her moves.

In considering cold mail, her biggest concern was the risk of negative feedback. I was happy to explain that if someone does call up with a query or complaint, providing you can quickly answer any questions around the provenance of your data and tell them about the MPS, it is rare for a phone call to end badly. And that if there is ever a positive in this sort of situation, such calls provide a valuable opportunity to engage. If handled well, there is evidence to show that the relationship can in fact be deepened, even leading to a donation further down the line.

Overcoming concerns

When thinking about doing cold mail for the first time, concerns around falling foul of GDPR, of finding organisations to partner with that you can trust, as well as the right audience to send it to are quite natural.

But it can be very successful if you abandon any preconceptions at the door and look at it afresh. Not only is it a very effective channel for raising donations, but also for starting conversations that can lead to longer-term relationships.  

Responsive audiences

First though, it’s important to understand who it reaches – it might not be who you have in mind or who you usually target. Younger generations may be increasingly taking note of what comes through their doors but generally, because of where most cold mail data comes from (mainly lifestyle and mail order files as well as the Electoral Roll open register), the retired community are the easiest to reach, and still the most responsive audience.

Yet while the audience may, in the main, be a certain demographic, a real positive of cold mail data is that these are people already receptive to being contacted – and responding – via this channel. Lifestyle data is great to use too because it allows you to define the selection criteria to find the most relevant audience for your cause and campaign – for instance, a younger demographic.

Route to success

It may also be tempting to think geographically – mail, as you would expect, allows you to target by postcode. But again, if you’re thinking of going down this route, it requires perhaps more consideration than you might imagine to ensure a successful response rate.

To take an example from a different sector, I was once asked to source data for a company selling jardinières. They had imported 50,000 and wanted to sell them in a very specific part of London. The only problem being that most homes in that area were flats and would not have room (e.g. a garden) to put a jardinière, so whilst his business case made sense it didn’t work in the real world. This kind of situation can also happen to charities. To avoid this, if you’re looking at targeting a specific area, it’s important not to make assumptions and to look at it in detail first. 

Mailing and test volumes also need careful consideration. If you are a charity with large appeal –people interested in helping animals, children or supporting a cancer-related cause for example – you will have a large potential audience. How big a universe of names you test and then mail however depends on both your resources and objectives. If you are likely to only ever have a relatively small budget, it’s better to stick to a smaller universe of names that you know respond well. If you are looking for significant growth, you will want to keep the scope broader, in which case it's also worth looking at whether there are sub-sectors you can speak to.

If you have a regional bias on the other hand, or think that your organisation has niche appeal, there is no point testing 150,000 records and looking to mail 1 million within the year, as it is unlikely that this volume of names will be available. But unlike in the past, when everyone sent out huge volumes of mail to get the responses they needed, the quality of cold data available means you don’t need huge volumes to get a good response anyway. You just need to choose your data carefully so your appeal reaches the right people. This way you’ll also get a much better response rate.

If you’ve never considered cold direct mail before, and aren’t of the demographic that generally receives it, looking at it through your own prism might make you think that it’s a channel that’s not really used any more. Or that doesn’t garner a good return on investment. In fact, with a range of charities using it successfully and achieving strong results, nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it’s worth a look.