Direct Mail Spotlight: 3 Ways to Choose Images That Sell

There are typically three main components of a direct mail piece: the message, the creative, and the offer. In most direct marketing campaigns, your first impression is made by the images and you choose the rest of the creative to support your message. Before your target audience reads a word of text in your mail piece or postcard, their eyes will focus on the images they contain. Too often, these images are the same overused stock photos that appear in hundreds of other direct marketing pieces-images. Because of their ubiquity, these images fail to grab attention or break through the clutter.

Choosing effective images for your direct mail campaign is linked very closely to response and the success of the campaign as a whole. Here are three tips to keep in mind that will support those goals:

1. Your images should support an effective call to action.
The goal of every direct mail piece is to evoke an emotional response in the recipients that motivates them to take action.

With emotion stimulating the mind 3,000 times faster than rational thought, recently published findings in neuroscience indicate it's emotion, not reason, that primarily drives customers' purchasing decisions. The images you choose are the first opportunity to create that emotional response. If the images don't accomplish this, there are a number of readily available graphic design tools that can enhance effectiveness and change the impact of the image altogether.

With a little help from some graphic design techniques, you can turn dull stock photography into something that commands attention and evokes a response. (You can view some before and after examples here.)

An image can enhance a strong marketing message, even if at first it doesn't seem related to the actual product or service. For example, we created a piece for a hair salon that opened with a woman throwing leaves in the air that spelled out the recipient's name on the cover with the headline "Fall is just around the corner." The message inside followed with: "So are we!" Some might think, "what does the woman have to do with the salon?" But, once they open the piece, the image connect with the message in a compelling way. The idea is to consider creative ways to use images to motivate the recipient to respond to your call to action.

• MORE ON
• DIRECT MAIL & POSTAL
• PRINT PRODUCTION & FULFILLMENT