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Direct Mail Marketing Services

Direct mail as a marketing program, not a one-off

Sending one postcard and waiting by the phone isn't a strategy. This guide covers the marketing side of direct mail: who to mail, what to say, how often, how to track it and how to tell if it paid. It also covers what a direct mail marketing service does when you hand some of that off.

Checked November 7, 2026

The program

  1. Audience
  2. Offer
  3. Cadence
  4. Measure
  5. Math
then do it again, better

The five parts of a program

  1. Audience. Who gets mailed, chosen from a list or by area. See mailing lists.
  2. Offer. The reason to respond now. See offers.
  3. Cadence. How often, and for how long. See planning a campaign.
  4. Measurement. How you'll know what came from the mail. See tracking.
  5. Math. What it cost against what it earned. See ROI.

A note on numbers

You'll find plenty of "average response rate" figures online. We don't repeat them, because they rarely say where they came from and they won't match your market anyway. Everything here works with your own numbers, and the ROI calculator shows you what has to be true for a mailing to pay.