Best Practices For Direct Mail 2023 And Beyond If you wrote a standard, garden-variety blog about best practices in direct mail, it would tell you things you already know: focus on your target audience, include a call to action, use readable fonts and colors, and so forth. There’s nothing wrong with these recommendations other than...
Leveraging Direct Mail to Market Your Giving Days and End of Year Appeals When it comes to fundraising, the term “annual giving” is assigned to any gift amount that isn’t considered a major gift. Depending on who you ask, the term itself has different meanings: To a donor, “annual” could be that one-time gift that...
AI and direct mail Every marketer is talking or thinking about artificial intelligence – and if they’re not fretting over whether it’s coming for their job they’re thinking up different ways to use it. For instance, the agency Zappi conducted an experiment where they let AI create the packaging and product descriptions for seven trendy new...
Using Direct Mail to Simplify the Donor Experience and Drive Online Giving The advent and growth of cellular technology, mobile devices and wireless internet has created a population that is continuously logged in. It seems that most of what we do – shopping, gaming, dining, entertainment – is literally at our fingertips. Many decisions made...
The QR-Code Primer, Part 2: The Best Ways Of Using QR Codes In Direct Mail In our last blog we talked about why some marketers don’t use QR codes, and implicitly, why they should. This time we’re looking at effective ways of using QR codes in a direct-mail context to improve the stickiness and impact...
Extending Your Brand’s Shelf Life: Placing a Premium in your Direct Mail Have you ever grabbed a free sample while shopping at a grocery store? Or walked through an exhibit hall and snatched some tchotchkes from an exhibitor? Or binge-watched an entire series on a streaming service during a free trial period? People like free...
The QR-Code Primer, Part 1: Why People Don’t Use QR Codes A marketing friend of ours was telling a story. It was a story in two parts; the first part took place in a meeting with a TV ad sales exec. “We recommend that our advertisers put QR codes on all their ads,” the sales...
Greatest Bits: Finding the Nuggets from Marketing Blogs to Support Your Advancement Efforts Prior to my position at JHL, I spent about nine years working in annual giving. Two years were spent as an assistant director with the Florida State University Foundation. The other seven years was as the director at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens...
The 4 ways direct mail can build successful products and services We’ve talked a lot in in previous blogs about how to use direct mail to promote your brand. What we haven’t talked about is how to use direct mail to promote and build demand for a product or service. Could be an existing product...
5 Ways Direct Mail Can Drive Data-Driven Marketing Direct mail can be an important component of your data-driven marketing (DDM) campaign, both for the efficient way it uses data and the crucial data it can generate. Let’s consider that statement for a second, because many blogs that talk about DDM don’t characterize the process that...