Over the past 50 years, U.S. companies sent billions of pieces of mail with an eye toward increasing sales. Everything from simple letters and postcards for CDs, brochures dimensions and three boxes of cereal found its way into mailboxes across the country. Needless to say, billions of dollars riding on the success or failure of these articles.

What are the keys to success? Talk to them! The best way to ensure the success of your direct mail campaign is to personalize it with a call, make it easy for customers to respond and measure results. Success of the campaign is measured as return on investment (ROI) - or how many total sales were generated in relation to the cost of the marketing campaign.

If you are using a long-term campaign, check email on a small scale first. The performance of test information to decide how many copies you want to send. Make sure you have enough to send the answers to precisely determine their response to treatment and the effectiveness of the message. A good rule is to test between 1000 and 5000 copies to start. Your answer will vary by product, industry, target market and other factors. You can add your reply to the list, please pay attention to these factors:

• Use Discount Postage - Did you know that you can buy postage stamps at a discount? It's 100% legitimate and there's nothing unethical or dishonest about it. You can buy inexpensive, discount, BELOW FACE VALUE postage for your campaigns. With this postage you can have a theme or just "dress up" your envelopes or post cards, you can make them historically interesting. You can buy this inexpensive money saving postage in all denominations. You can buy them as singles, blocks, sheets, or booklets, whatever you want. YOU CAN SAVE HUNDREDS of dollars.

• Objective of the campaign - What is the purpose of your campaign? You want to build brand awareness, generate leads or make an immediate sale? Once you have decided on your goals, determine how many answers you need to make this campaign a success, then monitor the results.

• Mailing List - Make sure your list is geared towards your actual buyers. Identify who your customers and build a list based on these criteria. What are the unique features make your share of customers? Do business customers or consumers? Where are they located? How are they rich? These issues are specific to your business and must be answered before the process of list building.

• Bid - to make a good deal is one of the most important parts of an e-mail list. If a free gift or discount discount, the offer is so attractive, is too good to refuse. Also, make sure that the offer has an expiration date. From time to time, it was shown that most people respond to the offer, when there is a limit on how long to respond.

• Benefits - to highlight the benefits of what your product or service will make your potential customer. Do not dwell only on the characteristics of your offer. Focus on what your service or product can do for the customer: Double your sales performance, receive a 50 percent savings in time, lose 10 pounds in 10 days. Trying to quantify the benefits available, so that they are concrete and credible. If you have an important valuable asset, you may also want to use the title of the offer.

• Customer value - Knowing what each new customer is worth. This usually comes down to understanding the customer lifetime value (LCV), or the actual benefit (selling price less direct cost of goods sold) associated with each new sale. How often do you buy a new client for the next two or three years. By multiplying these two numbers gives LCV. This is the maximum amount you can spend to acquire a new customer.

• Campaign costs - Understand from the start how much you need to invest in your campaign. Take the total price of your mailing list, including creative, printing, postage and labor, and divide that number into the LCV. This will tell you how many sales you need to do to break even on the campaign.