Doing More With Less: Set up a Staggered Mailing Campaign

Chances are you're in the same boat as most other businesses: you know aggressive, consistent marketing is vital, but right now you need ways to stretch your marketing dollars further while you wait for business to rebound. Here's a simple strategy for planning your mailings that will make sure you maintain the same reach while reducing your monthly cost by as much as 2/3rds.

Let's say you normally market to a list of 1000 prospects on a monthly basis (chart A), but thanks to a reduced marketing budget, mailing to 1000 addresses each and every month has become unrealistic. Simply split your prospect list into 3 segments of 333 addresses each (chart B). This way, you'll continue to reach all 1000 prospects, just on an adjusted frequency. This ensures that you're still maintaining consistent contact with each prospect, which is one of the single most important factors in a successful direct mail campaign. Reducing frequency may not be ideal, but in most cases it is preferable to trimming your prospect list.


Of course, this strategy can be tailored for your individual needs, such as splitting your list into 2, 3, 4 or 5 segments, or you can change the frequency of your mailings to weekly or bi-weekly. Another smart modification is to overlap your segment mailings during busier seasons to increase response rates (chart C).

We've included several examples of different staggered campaigns at the bottom of the page, but it's easy to create one on your own that fits your particular business. Retail businesses may want to bump up the frequency during the Fall holidays (C2), while a landscaping business may want to concentrate their campaign in the Fall and Spring (C3).

expresscopy.com makes it easy to set up rotating campaigns like these. Your online or uploaded designs are all saved for easy re-use in "Finished Designs", and our scheduling calendar allows you to set up mailings months in advance. This means you can set up all mailings for the remainder of the year in a single visit. If you need to update a mailing list, tweak your creative, or adjust a mailing date, no problem -- you can always access and edit a scheduled order prior to production. Finally, as an added benefit to your stressed marketing budget, you won't be charged for the scheduled mailings until their production date.

Have questions about segmenting your list or planning your mailings? No problem, give us a call at 1-800-260-5887 and we'll be happy to help you set up a staggered campaign.

More examples of staggered mailing campaigns: