In talking with a church planter this week, I was asked the question, “Wouldn’t it be better to target our direct mail to a specific audience, rather than mail to everyone?”  I had a few thoughts, but thought I’d asked an expert.  So I turned to Eric Reiss at Church Marketing Solutions.  I thought his answer was insightful.

Q: Let’s say rather than doing a saturation mailing to 30,000 households we did a targeted mailing to 15,000.  Assuming we did a run of four cards, is the cost saving of doing a targeted list worth it?

A: Two ways to look at this.  One, I think a targeted list would be more effective than a saturated list, in terms of response rate.  Twice as effective versus a 30k mailing?  Maybe, I don’t have hard data to support that in church mailings, but in direct mail on the secular side, absolutely, you’ll see rates go 4x higher with targeted versus saturation.

The second way to look at this is, you’re saving ~$2500 versus a 30k saturation… But in that case you’re still hitting your target folks (cause you’re hitting everyone, including target people) and 15,000 other homes as well.  $2500 is cheap for 15,000 touches and if you even get one family from that group… It may be worth doing.

My recommendation for a church plant would be to do a blended model.  If you’re thinking 4 touches, do 3 saturated, 1 targeted… Or maybe 4 saturated and 1 highly targeted more impactful mailing to people you think are the most likely to plug in.

Here are numbers for two scenarios in that vein:

D) 3 x 30k saturated, 1 x 10k targeted (100,000 cards total)

$12,087 production cost
$  1,600 targeted list data
$  7,720 estimated postage ($6120 saturated, $1600 targeted)

$21,407 total budget

E) 4 x 25k saturated, 1 x 5k targeted (105,000 cards total)

$11,812.80 production
$  7,500 estimated postage
$     800 targeted list data

$20,112.80 total budget

Maybe you send the 5k a higher impact piece (nice letter in an envelope, or something creative, you would add some cost, but might drive response for that group through the roof).

Q: What is you expert opinion on a targeted list vs. a saturation list?

A: I think we’ll see more and more of targeted lists in the future.  Sometimes they will make a HUGE amount of sense.  If you’re doing a marriage workshop, send to the married couples.  If a kid’s camp, send to households with children, etc…

The two opportunities for targeted mailing are 1) not waste resources on people who will NOT be interested and 2) the chance to adapt your message to a specific group based on data.  I think the 2) here is the bigger opportunity for church plants.  If you can identify a group clearly in target, then message them more, or give them a higher impact piece… Might double or triple response rate to hit them better.

I would never recommend a church plant do direct mail without at least some saturated mailing.  Let everyone know you’re there.  The data and modeling may be superlative, but who knows where a random person might be in terms of coming to Christ.  I would hate to not give that person a touch, because they were 36, instead of 35 and my model targeted younger folks.  Even in the best case it is a blunt instrument

The other thing that makes this interesting in the church world is just how low the postage is to go ahead and saturate, with a 10-15% difference in price, why not go ahead and touch everyone (at least for some part of the series you’re doing)?

Thanks for the wisdom E.