3 Lessons to Learn from Discover’s Financial Services Direct Mail Campaign
How many pieces of direct mail do you receive every day? How many of those offers are for some type of financial marketing, like credit cards or home loans? Probably more than half. What that means to you is you’ve got some competition as you get ready to launch your financial services direct mail campaign.
Despite the competition, it is possible to get your audience’s attention—and win their business. All it takes is breaking the mould and doing financial services direct mail marketing a little differently than your competitors.
Discover recently launched a direct mail campaign for their home loans that offers three lessons you can apply to your campaign today. For the full story and a glimpse of what the piece looks like, read “Direct Mail Clinic: Dissecting Discover’s Approach to Home Loans” by Steve Bieber and Joe Swatek. Here are three lessons to take away from Discover’s success.
1. Less can definitely be more—especially when the financial services direct mail campaign is thoughtfully executed.
The Discover campaign is one sheet of paper in a 6×9 envelope. That’s it. Discover managed to say everything that needed to be said (disclaimers included) in this space. The copy writers distilled the complex information into a series of easy-to-understand statements and offer. How refreshing that must have been to the people who received it.
2. Make it easy to understand.
Tip 2 is very closely related to step one: presenting your product in plain language gets results. You have a very limited amount of time to get your reader’s attention. They won’t be impressed by how complicated you can make your product sound. But they will be impressed if you can make a complicated product sound simple.
3. Present a different kind of offer.
Just because everyone in your industry makes a certain type of offer, doesn’t mean you should. In fact, that’s probably the argument for why you shouldn’t. In Discover’s case, they focused on a monthly payment instead of a rate (which is what most home loans offer). Simple and much easier for the average consumer to understand. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes—what would make sense to them?
As you start to design your next financial services direct mail campaign, how can you incorporate these three lessons?