7 principles for direct marketing success:
- Establish your objective before you start
- Keep it simple
- Don’t make customer choose
- Generally one theme per promotion is best
- Target the right audience and market segments
- This will help you integrate your marketing with the sales department.
- Write copy to show what your product will do for the prospect
- Focus on the customer. They buy benefits, not features. Talk about how they will feel when they buy your product
- Make it easy for your prospect to respond
- Give as many methods to respond that you can; email, fax, web registration, phone, mail with return postage paid envelope
- Think campaign, not 1-shot
- Frequency is important in mail. Research shows that if no connection has been made after a mailing, send a follow up piece 2-4 weeks after the initial piece. This will raise the response rate by 50%.
- Research and test every year
- If you have done the research, you have not done testing and vise versa. You have to do both to understand what your success is.
- Develop measurement system to determine return on investment
- Do not measure just on CPM (cost per 1000), CPC (cost per click), or CPI (cost per inquiry) instead use conversion to sales, cost per order, contribution to overhead/profit and lifetime value
It's The Future Marketing 
Thank you for this post! If I could get a megaphone and broadcast #2 to the entire world, I would! So much money is wasted on direct mail & marketing when the right audience is not targeted. Most experts agree that 50% of the success of any direct mail campaign is determined by the list selection. #5 is too often overlooked as well. A relationship has to be established over time before the first sale or donation will be made. All good points!
Thanks for noting about the post!