A lot of businesses commit the naive mistake of completely undermining their offline marketing campaigns. Yes, internet marketing is the future, but that doesn’t mean you cannot milk the age-old strategies that are still effective. One of those time-tested methods to promote businesses is direct mailing campaigns.

When done wrong, marketing mails end up in the trash without even escaping their printed envelope shell. Armed with the right strategy, direct marketing mails still packs a pretty mean punch. Therefore, if your direct mail campaign is failing to generate the desired results it makes good sense to tweak it instead of abandoning it all together. To help you with that, following are 5 things new businesses get wrong about direct marketing campaigns.

Not Being Creative Enough: Here’s the thing, you cannot expect a marketing strategy to bear fruit if it’s mind numbingly boring. To understand why boring ads and campaigns do not work it’s important to understand the competition. An average person is subjected to hundreds of ads on a daily basis. These ads are so intrusive and relentless that most people have begun unconsciously ignore internet pop-ups and television ads. Audiences only pay attention when the content is unique and interesting. To understand where the bar is set, marketers have used folded origami paper to uniquely reveal their marketing messages. Some direct mailing strategies even involve sending personalized gifts.

Ignoring the Envelope: Considering the fact that every household receives dozens of marketing mailers every day, it makes sense to invest in an envelope that’s attention grabbing. Buy printed envelopes online and customize it to match your campaign’s theme. You can even buy colorful printed envelopes, which instantly gives your mail an advantage over the ones packed inside boring white and brown envelopes.

Underutilizing Infographics: There is a reason why infographics work. People usually do not like to read long chunks of text. Infographic contents keep things simple and interesting by making your message visually impressive rather than text-heavy. While not all marketing campaigns can use infographics, you can always sneak in a beautiful infographic widget to break the monotony of texts.

Offering Something That’s Actually Interesting: You can create the most attractive pamphlets and pack them inside the most beautiful printed envelopes, but it will fail to generate positive results if the core message is underwhelming. Evaluate the offer and try and tweak it to make sure it’s appealing to the target audience. Which brings us to the next point, setting target audiences.

Not Targeting Customer Bases and Finding New Ones: Getting a mailing list is only the first step. You need to filter the list to make sure you are targeting the right people. This is because no matter what you do, you cannot sell refrigerators to people living in the poles. Consult a marketing expert who can help you identify the customer bases you should target. It’s also a splendid idea to try and find new customer bases and target them specifically utilizing a direct marketing campaign that’s geared towards them.