Direct mail strategy that starts with the objective, not the paper stock

Most direct mail plans start at the print shop counter. Card size, paper weight, how many thousand. We think that's backwards. A strategy starts with the objective: a first purchase, a booked appointment, a lapsed customer coming back. Once that's written down, the rest of the plan has something to answer to.

This section covers the planning layer. How to set a budget you can afford to learn from. How many waves to plan before you judge a campaign. Why a small test on 2,000 households often beats a big drop on 20,000. How to connect a piece of mail to a landing page, a phone number or a QR code so the result isn't a guess.

Coming up: the most common direct mail mistakes we see, and how a first-time mailer should scope a campaign. Until then, the articles below and the wire from other direct mail publishers are a good place to start.