Amid tighter budgets and higher postal rates, more direct mailers are pondering whether or not to test the self-mailer format. "I think direct mail budgets (and client requests) have been trending toward smaller, more cost-efficient formats for some time, well over a year," states Steve Penn, CEO and executive creative director of Penn Garritano Direct Response Marketing in Minneapolis.

Yet not all marketers have witnessed a significant move to self-mailers, especially among sectors traditionally unfriendly to the format. "I really question the validity of this trend," comments Russell Kern, founder and CEO of The Kern Organization, a direct marketing company based in Woodland Hills, Calif. "I have not seen large-scale, highly successful direct mailers use a self-mailer. And I've never seen a self-mailer beat a traditional letter kit for any length of time. The [recent] DMA study of mailers also shows the same thing."

However, in some markets, employing the self-mailer makes plenty of sense. Here are some key questions to ask before going forward.

1. Where exactly are self-mailers trending upward?
"Retail and consumer direct mailers have been using postcards and self-mailers to drive retail traffic and online activity for the past several years, but where I've noticed the biggest trend is in lead generation for business-to-business marketers and not just in any particular industry, but really across the board," says Penn, whose company last year downsized a 9˝ x 12˝ control package for a B-to-B client to a 6˝ x 9˝, and this year is testing trifold self-mailers.

Although new postal regulations concerning flats have made it difficult for magalog and tabloid mailings, they remain the standard format in some markets, says Bob Bly, a copywriter based in Dumont, N.J. and author of "The Copywriter's Handbook." "For financial newsletters, magalogs are the most popular DM format. For business opportunity, digests are working. For nutritional supplements, tabloids have worked well. For B-to-B lead generation, postcards have become very popular—much more so than trifold self-mailers with tear-off BRCs," he explains.

Kern says self-mailers are also good for educational marketers, auto dealers, traffic generation activities and catalog marketers. Matt Cote, an account manager at Ballantine, a New Jersey-based direct mail company, mentions trade-show marketing and travel/resort-related industries that frequently employ self-mailers, along with some publication testing as well.

Accordingly, as seen in the Target Marketing Group's Who's Mailing What! Archive, the self-mailer is growing within the publications field, with 18.4 percent of publishing efforts using self-mailers so far this year after only 13.4 percent did so in 2007.

2. Why is self-mailer usage going up in some markets?
"Postage rates. It's the cost. It is, I think, that simple to a large degree. In consumer mail, the trend has usually been to mail smaller but smarter because of the volume. It can be a tremendous cost to large mailers," explains Penn, who says it remains to be seen whether increasingly smaller formats can perform as well in B-to-B situations. "A fair amount of real estate is often required to tell complicated stories ... especially when it comes to selling big-ticket purchases like machinery or technology."

Ryan Cote, director of marketing at Ballantine, concurs. "I look at self-mailers as a simplified mail piece. They're easier to produce and generally cost less (depending on many variables of course) ... but they still allow for a variety of response vehicles: toll-free number, Web site address, PURL, tear-off reply card. We even have some publication clients testing a double postcard self-mailer with a BRE glue-tacked inside," he reveals.

For Kern, he's witnessed a trend to use self-mailers where variable data printing comes into play. "Thus for mailers who have audiences under 500,000 and can afford a 15-cent to 25-cent cost per package given their profit margin, they are using self-mailers," he illustrates.

3. In what markets should the self-mailer format be kept to a minimum?
Anywhere letter packages remain the norm, self-mailers have a tough road to haul in terms of both response rate and, certainly, longevity. "I far prefer letter packages to self-mailers, and so do most prospects," says Nancy Harhut, senior vice president/managing director of relationship marketing at Hill Holliday, a full-service marketing company based in Boston.

Kern says, "For direct sale, drive to the phone, I'm not a fan of [self-mailers]. I'm just an opinion of one, but having the responsibility to mail over 500 million pieces of mail and seeing hundreds of tests a year, I can't say I've seen self-mailers be a workhorse for any of my clients. Maybe it's because we have such scale [that] we can produce a letter kit cheaper than a self-mailer."

In fundraising, for example, one would expect to see a rise in self-mailer usage because of postal costs hitting that sector so hard. Accordingly, Save the Children sent out a successful triple postcard back in November 2007 (profiled in the February issue of Inside Direct Mail). But no shift has occurred in the sector, yet, with the percentage of efforts that are self-mailers actually sinking to its lowest level in the past five years in the Who's Mailing What! Archive to 4.1 percent this year.

4. What are the best ways to maximize this format?
Just as there are many new players in the self-mailer game, there are equally many new ways to play it. "Where self-mailers can seem to work with our clients (notably telecom[munications] and finance) is with retail-like offers, where the message is simple ('do this before X date' or 'go to this URL for a special offer') and the format underscores it," says Harhut.

For the B-to-B market, Bly agrees, partly because he says marketers are convinced that executives have no time to read. "Their self-mailers have minimal copy—typically a headline, three to five bullets and a Web site URL—with an emphasis on creative color graphics," he describes.

That design emphasis is key, of course, for self-mailer success. "It must have an arresting mail panel, a cover that makes you want to open it, then a clear presentation of the offer, which crescendos into the call to action. All easier said then done!" admits Kern.

Some marketers get a warm and fuzzy feeling every time they think of how well Web analytics serve their companies. That's especially true for Carol Ott, director of e-commerce finance and Web analytics for San Diego-based PETCO.

Ott explains how marketers should pay far more attention to Web site traffic than first click and last click—there's plenty of information in between, too. Target Marketing spoke with Ott after her Dec. 10 session at NCDM in Orlando, Fla. titled "Customizing Clicks: Using Customer Data for Optimized Campaigns."

Target Marketing: Based on your experience, how should direct marketers analyze site behavior for better marketing attribution?
Carol Ott: I think the best way to look at marketing attribution is to look at first click, look at last click and also doing a mix, because many people come in for four to seven visits to your Web site. PETCO is about serving real people that come to our stores on a regular and loyal basis. Knowing how they interact with us over time and through different channels is imperative if we are going to know when and where to present them with products and offers that will meet their needs.

Looking only at a single visit in a store or on the site is really short-sighted for our goals. For example, if you don't look at first click, you could be removing a marketing source that's introducing first-time visitors to your brand. And if you don't hit on the middle points, then you could be missing an opportunity to remind them about your brand. In my experience, it is really important to look at all touchpoints and not rely on a simple first- or last-click model.

TM: How should companies measure marketing ROI based on a complete picture of customer behavior?
CO: For a true, complete picture analysis, you need to bring in all the channels customer[s] touch. You need to build a complete picture of your visitors to know how they interact with stores, [the] call center and your Web site. If your company has a loyalty program, this should also be brought into the mix. We're in the process of changing the user experience on the Web based on their information on their loyalty program. If they're always an in-store shopper, it'll promote all the store promotions; if they're always an online shopper, it'll be a much different experience. That's our goal in the future; we're just not there yet.

TM: How should direct marketers gain insight into the importance of cross-sell offerings?
CO: We're actually doing a lot of testing with cross-sell offerings across the site from the homepages through the cart. Companies should look at finding out how people are browsing and buying. It is important to tweak the algorithm to serve up the best possible recommendations. It's definitely highly beneficial in increasing your average order value.

TM: PETCO already provides customers with a lot of cross-sell opportunities, correct? Why continue to test?
CO: Yes, but we're still testing. In this economy, it's really important to justify marketing investments based on results and to adjust programs along the way. Your product assortment is continually changing. What a person purchases together one month may differ in the future. There are definitely cycles for some products and product offerings. Everything's always an ongoing test. Yes, we have a lift now, but how can we make that lift better? And so we're always improving upon it.

TM: What value do promotions have, and how do they work together online to optimize clicks?
CO: You have very limited space on your Web site and very limited time to engage visitors before they abandon your site. It is important to utilize the space to engage someone to clickthrough to see the actual offering and/or to make a purchase.

This is where benchmarking comes in—you want to spot trends and compare your performance against your competitors, or even against how you were doing last year. We've created benchmarks on our placements, and we're getting to a point where we know our dollars per day that we should be seeing in those placements. We focus on many key performance indicators to determine successfulness: dollars per day, sales of advertised products and shift in product views (during [the promotion] and prepromotion).

Personalization of direct mail pieces requires a substantial investment, but it may be just the sort of new technology that any lagging direct mail campaign needs in the current economy—including preparing for when things get even worse.

"To really utilize personalization, we're really talking about relevant communication. The more relevant that communication, the better the response rate," says Mike Walther, president of DME, a personalized relationship marketing agency based in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Here are four tips for taking advantage of this powerful technology and making it as relevant to the prospect as possible.

1. Go multichannel
"Multichannel campaigns will outperform non-multi campaigns," states Walther, who gives examples of a PURL and a mail piece or an e-mail with embedded links as multichannel efforts that have worked well for his clients.

2. Be industry-specific
"You really need to understand an industry and the touchpoints and the communication points and the relevance of those communication points to be effective [with personalization]," recommends Walther.

3. Get relevant data
With privacy issues becoming more prevalent, it can be a struggle to get more relevant data. Walther advises that marketers work with their customers to maintain better internal databases. "And then you have to be creative in terms of where you get that information ... the databases of customers [are] a mailer's most prized asset," he asserts.

4. Understand the ground rules about relevancy
Before you begin to use that relevant data, Walther recommends you ask a couple of crucial questions: "What information do we know about the potential customer to make sure that the group that we mail to and the conversation we have is as relevant as possible? And are we going to get too relevant, so they think that Big Brother or a breach of trust occurs?"

Two weeks ago, I hosted one of Inside Direct Mail's highest rated webinars. Entitled Winning Over Today's Tough Prospects ... with Innovative Direct Mail, and featuring two top experts, the information and presentations proved to be both highly relevant and actionable for many marketing organizations.

The presenters were multi-award winning Wayne Pick and Kim Pick, executive creative director and head of copy, respectively, at Rapp New Zealand—a direct marketing agency based in Auckland. Their work has won more than 80 major international awards in the past three years alone.

The overriding mission of their topic? To help direct marketers break free of formulaic direct mail and get truly innovative, including creating direct mail that not only doesn't intrude, but may even be welcomed by prospects that are suffering from both fiscal and time poverty.

Here are three tips (each was accompanied in the webinar by some excellent examples) that listeners picked up:

1. Be relevant
Make sure the effort resonates with its target audience, via a message or offer that demonstrates real insight into the audience and how it feels and behaves. Wayne Pick discussed a mail piece a bank sent to farmer prospects who were competitor-loyal, cynical and time-poor. The copy on the outer package read, "To get to know your business, we'll walk from one end of your farm to the other." Forty-four percent of recipients invited a bank manager to talk, and 64 percent opened an account.

2. Be entertaining
Efforts that reward with humor, or a smile in the mind, can aid any marketing message, making it more friendly and increasing the response rate. For Sky TV Wrestlemania, Rapp New Zealand used a faux-red meat package, complete with dried, fake blood, featuring the tagline, "Who's Gonna Be MINCEMEAT?" to promote a live pay-per-view event to New Zealanders, for whom the event's 7 p.m. Orlando, Fla. time was noon on Monday. Results? More than half of the 14,714 mailed paid to watch the event at lunchtime on Monday.

3. Be honest, open and transparent
You can tease, but don't mislead. The offer must be made clear, and it shouldn't try to trick prospects into responding with false hope. For Dish Magazine, the Picks designed a high-end self-mailer to resemble a menu personalized for each prospect's very own home ("Bistro on [prospect's street]"; "Chef [prospect's name]"). The Picks' effort, to a list of customers who'd twice rejected earlier subscription offers, increased response by 317 percent.