Direct Mail Faq - What kind of a response rate should i expect?

Response-rate is not the thing that you want to be looking at. You want to think, 'What return on investment do I want?' That depends on so many things. If you have a product that you sell, that is a couple thousand dollars, you need less responses to make a lot more money than somebody who sells something for $30 or $50. If you sell something for $50, but that customer reorders from you over and over again, then you have a lifetime value of a customer of $5,000. You have to understand what the formula is. How many customers do you need to make X-amount of money right up front, and what is that going to be over the course of a lifetime? How much money will you make off of that one mailing, overall? You need to look at your return on your investment, not necessarily your response rate. There are certain industries that will get higher response rates. Those industries are niche industries, like a chess school or a swimming class for infants, something that is very niche and not a million competitors. If you are a dentist or a chiropractor, there are other dentists and chiropractors marketing at the same time, using the same mediums that you are using, so your response rate is going to be a little bit lower. Again, if your website is fantastic and really engages the visitor, you will get more responses. If you have a good campaign to collect identities of people going to your website, you will get more responses. It is really, 'The ball is in your court,' on that. It depends on your product and it depends on how many competitors you have. You really want to look at, 'How much money am I going to make?'