We recently came upon an article on LinkedIn written by a Financial Services Marketing Consultant regarding the importance of including direct mail in an integrated campaign. There are some great statistics within the article in particular some findings from a study conducted by the research company Millward Brown. Click here to read this article.

The DMA show this past week afforded us the opportunity to speak with hundreds of marketers. Outside of the occasional tag-along with sales, the folks in marketing rarely get to speak directly with our prospects and customers. Every business seems to have their common misconceptions from its customers, but sometimes us folks in marketing need a reminder. I was surprised that there were still some old misconceptions about dimensional mail out there. Here are a couple of common misconceptions we hear.

1. Dimensional mail is too expensive. This is one of those misconceptions that we may never get rid of because on the surface, without any analysis, dimensional mail appears expensive. That’s because it costs more than a postcard or standard white envelope. However, I believe it’s far more expensive to mail a campaign that produces lack-luster results when that money and effort could have been put towards a high-impact dimensional solution that can produce, according to the 2010 DMA Response Rate Report, average response rates of 8.51%. So while your upfront investment is often higher, your return is much higher and should more than justify the cost of the campaign.

That being said, Structural Graphics is always budget-conscious when we’re designing a direct mail piece or campaign. For example, many of our most popular dimensional designs actual ship completely flat, saving significant amounts of money on postage. Furthermore, our paper engineers and production team are highly skilled at planning the printing and production of our work to realize the greatest number of efficiencies. For example, a paper engineer may recommend making a design 1/8” smaller on one side simply to fit more on a single sheet during printing. These small considerations add up to large savings for the overall campaign.

2. Dimensional mail takes too long to produce. This could not be further from the truth. Of course it takes longer than printing a letter out and stuffing a business-sized envelope. Sure, I’ll give you that. However, we have been doing this for over 30 years. Our printing and production process is efficiently streamlined to allow for production of some of our most popular designs in as few as 10 days. Furthermore, we do all of our designing, printing and hand assembly in North America. If your design requires hand assembly we actually own the facilities in Mexico where this is done, and have our own customs agents to insure your project keeps moving. We’re pretty darn good at meeting tight deadlines, because for some reason, time is a luxury few of our clients ever have.

Our booth at the DMA show always seems to attract a wide variety of businesses and marketers. While the misconceptions I mentioned are common in the marketplace, there are those folks who never echo those sentiments when they’re at the booth. Those are our clients. If you would like to hear their opinion, instead of my slightly bias point of view, I would invite you to visit our website. On each of the Client Industry pages you can read testimonials from many of our top clients who continue to work with us.

Every year the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) releases a Response Rate Report. The results come from their research and polling of various marketers across various industries. The 2010 report doesn’t hold too many surprises, but does confirm that direct mail continues to be the silver bullet for b-to-b marketers.

When you look at Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in the b-to-b space, the average response rates were 5.27%. However, the average cost per click was $4.59. So while the average response rates for PPC campaigns were not that bad, the cost is pretty high.

Email marketing faired a little better.  The average open rate is a surprising 19.85%. However, those are just people that opened the email. The average click through rate was 7.26%. This percentage isn’t really a measurement of response, however. An email response is actually when someone not only clicks on the link, but also performs some sort of call to action.

The study found that the average response rate for a letter-sized mailer to a house list was 4.28%. For respondents that used dimensional mail, the average response rate shot up to 8.51%.

It seems that each of three most popular direct marketing methods have their strengths and weaknesses. Direct mail continues to provide consistent, reliable results. That being said, I would argue that the most effective method is in combining all three into an integrated campaign. Bridging digital with high-impact dimensional mail has resulted in incredible ROI for our clients, in both the b-to-b and b-to-c space.

To read more about the study click here.