Direct mail benefits that can't be measured easily.

• Author: Turner, Jim
• Position: Direct Mail Essentials

One of the great strengths of direct mail is its accountability. Most mailings are quantifiable, easily tracked and potentially quite proof liable. But what is the total measure of a mailings success?

There are numerous financial calculations a bank can use: Response rate, breakeven point, cost per response, cost per customer, return on investment. lifetime value of a customer and so forth. Most of these measures are either impossible or very difficult to quantify with other media, so they become a focus in direct mail.

But direct mail also can offer other less measurable accomplishments that contribute to the value of your mailing.

Let's use the example of a mailing for a home-equity line of credit. The most significant and apparent benefit comes from, first, the inquiries and, second, the applications you receive. The response rate might be only 1 percent or even fewer of the recipients (although that still may be enough to produce a very profitable mail- ing). However, among the other 99 percent, there likely are many who saw or read the mailer, but for one reason or another didn't respond at this time. Perhaps they currently don't need to borrow money, or they already have a better rate, or they just didn't have time to reply this week so they set the mailer aside for later.

Therefore, for all of those who saw the contents of your mailer, you also made a "general advertising" impression about your bank and one or more of your products. Furthermore, this impression, while not easily measured, is relatively strong because it is made in color with nice graphics and long copy ... more content than you have time or space for in most other media.

Also usually left out of the response calculation is the benefit of other products sold. For example, offers for home-equity credit frequently produce some customers for purchase or...