Wait—wasn’t email supposed to kill direct mail? Despite the dire prophecies in the early days of the internet world, direct mail is not dead. In fact, with everyone else focusing their efforts online, your message sent via old-fashioned “snail mail” now stands a better chance than ever of getting read.

Email is definitely an important tool for the marketing tool box, but a business can’t exist on email alone. For keeping in touch with prospects and clients, email’s cost effectiveness can’t be beat. But direct mail has its advantages as well. In fact, direct mail can:

• Target a market with more precision. You can usually get far more specific with the types of people you want to acquire physical addresses for—and of course it’s much easier to do location-based targeting. Also, most people have just one business and one home address. How many email accounts do you think they have?

• Better capture the attention of cold prospects. If they don’t recognize your name in the “From” line, they may not bother to open the email. But an attention-getting print piece will always get seen when they’re sorting through the mail.

• Enhance the size and type of response. A recent study from Royal Mail found that using both direct mail and email can increase the recipients’ spending by 25%. And one direct-marketing agency is reporting that prospects who respond to a mailing are 10% to 20% more likely to convert to a qualified lead than email responders.

Postcards and letters are two relatively inexpensive ways to mail to your prospects. Here are a few tips for making them more effective:

- Great results start with a great list. The more targeted your list, the more targeted you can make your message, and the more response you will get. Average direct-mail response rates are reported to be anywhere from less than 1% to 2-3%. I once got a 16% response from a very small, targeted mailing to marketing directors at financial services agencies. And those leads doubled when I followed up by phone.

- Keep it simple. This means one problem, one solution. You can mention other services in a P.S., but keep the main copy and any materials you include (such as a brochure) focused on one issue.

- Include a call to action. This isn’t the time to be coy, you must tell readers exactly what to do next. Also, having multiple ways to respond (e.g. email, phone, visit your website, sign-up for a free report) will increase response.

- You MUST follow-up. On average, it takes at least three contacts (some say as high as 27 contacts) before people will respond. Call, send an email, mail another letter or postcard, but make sure you contact them at least three times with similar messages before you move on. (If you’re doing a large mailing and plan to do phone follow-up, send it out in “waves” so you aren’t overwhelmed by the number of calls to make.)

- Track your response. Tracking can save you time and money next time—so don’t skip it. A relatively easy, inexpensive way to do this is to set up a website address exclusively for each piece of the mailing and point it to the correct page on your website. Then you can measure results from web stats. Or if the desired result is a phone call, you can simply ask what prompted them to contact you.