Marketers have many channels to choose from when developing acquisition strategies. Direct Mail is a great way to prospect or acquire new supplement customers for many reasons.

There are several advantages that direct mail offers when it comes to marketing your supplement products.

Here are the main advantages of using direct mail for prospecting:

•    There exist vast sources of competitive lists available to mail your sales piece to.
•    Demographics of supplement buyers are ideal for direct mail marketing.
•    Life time value of customers is greatest when acquired through direct mail.
•    The sales piece or mailing piece gives you unlimited space to tell your “story”.
•    You can establish a one to one relationship with your customer.

The lifeline to a successful business in direct mail is to have ready, abundant and  a growing number of sources for prospecting.  While a lot of companies have transitioned advertising dollars to the internet, when it comes to the supplement market, direct mail continues to grow and prosper.  This is good for nutritional supplement companies. From a marketing and product perspective this trend not only makes sense but it should continue for years to come.

Nutritional supplements are used by consumers in all age categories across all income
levels. What makes direct mail so dynamic for supplement marketers however is not the  availability of names and addresses with income or age, but the competitive behavioral purchasing and psychographic variables available in certain lists.

The market for nutritional supplements through direct mail is already very strong.  Thus there are a lot of lists on the market that offer direct mail sold users of nutritional supplements.  This behavioral and purchasing characteristic of being a “known” nutritional supplement buyer is the difference between night and day when it comes to your marketing results. This one magical variable makes all the difference in the world when marketing your product through direct mail.

It just so happens that the biggest users of nutritional supplement products are the aging baby boomers, they grew up on direct mail, they enjoy direct mail and they are heavy information seekers.  This makes them ideal candidates for receiving direct mail on all types of nutritional supplements.

Most of the successful direct mail pieces for supplements tell an interesting story about the product and how it came to be available.  Many times there is a doctor or a scientist that endorses the product or perhaps they even created it, giving further validity to the combination of the ingredients found in the supplement.

The benefits expected from using the supplement are really what most of the mail piece should be focused on, the importance of the ingredients and how they can help the user of the product. Mail pieces can be written in many different formats and designs.  They can be mailed as components in an envelope, as a self mailer that looks like a magazine or a “digest” sized publication.  They can even be mailed in a post card format. Typically the more relevant information or sales copy provided the better. Direct mail doesn’t have limits to the marketer regarding the amount of content provided, so to the consumer or prospect can make an informed purchase decision.

Probably the strongest advantage of direct mail can be found when developing your own buyer or customer list from the prospect mailings that you do.  These customers respond to your next mailings or subsequent product mailings at much higher response rates than your original acquisition efforts. It’s not unusual for these customer mailings to produce results two to four times better than what your “cold” or prospect mailings yield.

This lifetime value of mailings to your customer list with the same product or other products from your nutritional supplement line creates the lifeline and the enterprise value for your direct mail supplement business.  These customers will power your growth

There are probably close to 70,000 different lists or sources for names available on the list market, but targeted lists made up of nutritional supplement buyers numbers between 100-200 different lists making the testing and developing of successful direct mail plans very manageable and highly predictable.  This availability of lists continues to be the fuel of growth for all future marketers of supplements looking to use this media for marketing their products.  With lists averaging in size between a couple thousand names and several hundred thousand names, the universe of buyers is well over 10 million individuals.

All marketing or communication channels have their unique advantages and disadvantages that set them apart from each other, but when it comes to nutritional supplements, direct mail has proven itself to be the hands down winner.

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