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A Checklist For Adapting Your U.S. Package For Overseas Markets
By Lisa Yorgey Lester
Your mail piece has a better chance of being opened and read abroad than it does at home; overseas markets receive far less direct mail than the United States. What's more, you may not have to start from scratch.
Many U.S. direct marketers have scored big response rates by adapting their domestic control and mailing it abroad.
It pays to stick close to winning U.S. creative. "You know it works with your customers," says Walt Terry, senior manager of international business development, circulation, for the National Geographic Society.
For this reason, many U.S. direct marketers take their top U.S. packages and adapt them for overseas markets. And the best way to do this, explains Terry, is component by component.
Weight
The weight of your direct mail piece largely determines how much it will cost to mail the package overseas. It often also dictates whether a mailer can afford to mail the package in its current form or if it will have to omit or adapt components. The cost of international postage is much higher than its domestic equivalent and often may account for 50 percent of your cost in the mail.
At Agora International, Managing Director Stacy Berver spends considerable time downsizing most of her U.S. controls for international mailings. The publisher's controls generally are 24-page self-mailers that weigh 1.8 ounces or more.
Because the cost to mail the same package overseas is considerably higher, Agora cannot afford to mail a package that weighs more than 1.5 ounces. As such, a 9˝x 12˝ mailing may be trimmed down to an 81⁄2˝ x 11˝ or 81⁄2˝ x 10˝ format. The result, says Berver, is a lighter, less expensive mailing that looks proportionately the same as the original, domestic control.
Once you've determined the allowable weight of your package, review and modify each component of the mailing.
Order Form
Both Berver and Terry devote a good deal of attention to the order form, and recommend this crucial mail component as the place to start.
Because it mails its English-language mail piece to multiple countries, National Geographic uses a standard order card onto which variable text is lasered. This allows it as many as 30 variations on six or seven elements of the order card, which include:
With the exception of Canada and Australia, Agora prices its products in U.S. dollars, but will accept all convertible currencies.
National Geographic takes advantage of variable printing to print its prices in the local currency and to list the popular payment methods (direct debit, credit card, etc.) of the recipient's country.
Letter and Inserts
To reduce the weight of a package, a mailer may cut back or consolidate the number of pages or inserts in a mailing. Agora, for instance, often decreases the number of pages in its self-mailers from 24 to 16, which may require cutting or tweaking copy.
The decision to translate your package into the local language largely depends on your product or service. Many U.S. direct marketers have successfully mailed their English-language controls with minor changes.
Either way, carefully review all copy. Convert any weights or measurements to the metric system, and remove or rewrite American slang and common references, such as "grand slam."
Carrier and Reply Envelopes
If a prospect's name and address is meant to peek through a glassine window on the carrier or reply envelope, make sure the window is large enough to accommodate an international address. Also, check to see if the address still is visible if the letter or order card shifts during transit.
Review
"A good marketer is an executive art director," says Terry, who feels it pays to make sure that in the end your package doesn't look like an adaptation. While any good marketer will look at a package from a cost-analysis standpoint, you also want to make sure the finished package isn't a watered-down version of the domestic control.
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