We’re particularly proud of our recent Sherlock Holmes integrated marketing campaign to launch a Stamp Mystery Pack from Guernsey Post. The elements involved direct mail, direct response print ads, an e-commerce website at www.sherlockstamps.com, pay-per-click advertising, and social media marketing via Facebook and blog seeding.

The brief was to speak directly to the stamp consumer and persuade them to buy the highly innovative Sherlock stamp story pack, so direct mail was an instinctive first approach to initially target their existing customers.

This isn’t junk mailing though. When done well, direct mailings are cost-effective and achieve good response rates, which means sales. Thousands of highly targeted mailings went out internationally. So the mailer design had to be just right.

Targeting customers in bulk is a fine art. You have to….

….avoid your mail being left around unopened, being thrown away, or being read and not acted upon. We first invited recipients to open and read the mailer by having Sherlock Holmes personally address them, “My Dearest… Mr John Smith” and lead them into the detective story with the cry “Your attention is urgently needed…”

Once inside the reader was rewarded with a the combination of beautifully written but obvious product copy and a visual style that matched the stamp pack illustrator’s unique Sherlock Holmes graphic novel style artwork.

The well-thought out incentives to purchase were two-fold: a promotion online driving people to win a holiday for two to Alderney, where the Sherlock Holmes story is set, as well as a pre-order bonus for previous customers, and free postage for both the order form and the stamp purchase.

The mailer, DL shaped as it’s known in the trade, included an added response section. This was the all important ‘response mechanism’ - a perforated tear-off order form, designed to be folded back in on itself to hide credit card details from prying eyes.

To give you another trade secret, we made sure that the web address was printed on the remainder of flyer left in the customer’s hands, so they knew where to make further orders, or have some fun poking around the www.sherlockstamps.com Whodunnit pages.

So in summary, why use DM? It’s a great way to talk directly one-to one to your customer and is a form of out-bound marketing that truly can be tracked. In this environment, every marketing pound needs to be proven to work, and as the great adman David Ogilvy once said with direct response “You know what works and what doesn’t work.”