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When it comes to creating a great direct mail piece, design plays a crucial role. But direct mail design involves more than just the colors and imagery on your piece. An effective design guides your prospects through your advertisement and drives home your marketing message in a visually appealing way. Great design also adheres to your brand standards and helps you create a cohesive brand image that’s easily recognizable.

In this guide, we’ll review the most important steps in creating a great mail piece: planning, designing, and proofing. Whether you’re creating your own piece or working with a company that’s designing it for you, you’ll find valuable direct mail design tips to improve your ads. Let’s get started.

Plan Out Your Direct Mail Piece

Planning out your direct mail piece ahead of time will help you streamline the design process by keeping you organized. Plus, if you encounter any problems down the road, you can revisit your initial strategy to get back on track. Follow the steps below to develop your plan.

Know Your Target Audience

It’s nearly impossible to design an effective direct mail piece if you don’t know who you’re targeting. Understanding what your audience wants helps you create a persuasive design that complements the copy you write. You’ll want to know things like how much information your prospects need, what offers they will respond to, and what kind of images will resonate with them before delving into the rest of the design process.

Identify the Goal of Your Piece

Another important step in planning your direct mail piece is identifying the goal or intent behind it. Why are you creating your advertisement in the first place? What are you hoping to achieve in terms of results?

Knowing the goal of your piece (and your campaign as a whole) helps you hone in on the message you want to send and informs your decisions about copy, imagery, and format. Speaking of which…

Choose the Right Format

With your audience and goal in mind, it’s now time to choose which direct mail format you’ll use. By format, we mean the type of mail piece you’re sending – menus, postcards, brochures, etc. Format is important because it dictates the amount of copy and images you can fit onto your piece. If your goal is to provide plenty of detail about your products or services, a larger piece like a brochure might be the best choice. On the other hand, if you just want to announce a sale or provide a few coupons, a postcard is probably your best bet.

It’s also important to consider the effect you want to have on prospects when they open the mailbox. In most cases, the larger the piece, the larger the impact. For example, using a large postcard to announce a sale is more likely to grab your prospects’ attention than a small flyer. However, keep in mind that the larger you go, the higher the price.

For more information on direct mail formats and which is best for your needs, check out our article, What Is Direct Mail Marketing?. Sims 4 jiggle mod.

Organize Copy Effectively

There are several key copy elements that usually appear on every direct mail piece. These include but are not limited to:

While there are no hard and fast rules for placing these copy elements, there are some basic principles to keep in mind. First, your headline should always be in a prominent place and in a larger typeface than your subheadings and supporting copy. Additionally, your offer and CTA need to stand out clearly since they’re the most important parts of your mail piece. Adhere to these simple guidelines, and you’ll ace one of the most important parts of direct mail design.

For help writing these key components, check out our companion piece on how to write direct mail copy that sells.

Develop a Grid Layout for Your Piece

Pro Tip

Before you move on to actually designing your piece, familiarize yourself with USPS mailing regulations. You don’t want to create a beautiful design only to find out you didn’t leave the proper space for the address panel. In most cases, you’ll be designing from a template provided by your direct mail or printing company and won’t have to worry about compliance. But it’s good to be aware.

The final step in planning out your mail piece is creating a grid layout. The term “grid layout” comes from the traditional use of graph paper to help line up your design elements. While using graph paper is no longer common, the term is still used today.

Copy elements should be laid out in plain text, showing placement and size relative to how it will be designed once planning is completed. Use image placeholders (dummy images), and don’t worry about choosing your background at this stage in the process. You can spend more time fine-tuning your image and color selection later.

Planning your piece ahead of time using a grid layout helps you establish flow throughout your advertisement. Plus, it allows you to identify problem spots on your piece that might trip audiences up as they read. Start with three variations so you have some options and narrow down to your final layout from there.

Design Your Direct Mail Piece

After you’ve finished planning out your direct mail piece, you’re ready to start designing. Keep the following in mind as you work on your ad.

Be Strategic with Fonts

The font you choose for your mail piece also plays a significant role in how readers perceive your ad. Keep the following in mind as you format the text:

Stick to one or two typefaces. While it’s tempting to use flashy fonts on your direct mail piece, your best bet is to use one or two typefaces that are easily scannable. Keep in mind that your prospects are quickly flipping through their mail and don’t want to decipher a jumbled mess of fonts.

Make sure it’s easy to read. In most cases, you’ll want to select a sans serif font (Arial) for your ads. Sans serif fonts don’t have small accents at the end of each letter stroke like serif fonts (Times New Roman), so they look uniform and simple. Mario kart mach 8 costco. This makes them easier for readers to scan and quickly comprehend.

Vary font size to add visual interest. Try using several different points (also known as weights or sizes) of the same font to jazz things up. Just remember to base your choice of font size on the importance of each copy component (i.e. put the headline in the largest font size).

Utilize White Space

Incorporating white space is another important aspect of effective direct mail design. Simply put, white space is the empty area between the different elements of your design (such as your logo and your CTA). Keep in mind that white space refers to the blank area on your piece, not an actual color. White space plays an important role in emphasizing the most important parts of your piece, while also keeping your ad from being cluttered and overcrowded.

Use Imagery Wisely

When it comes to making your direct mail piece memorable, imagery is one of your most powerful allies. Carefully chosen graphics get people’s attention and increase the likelihood of them reading your piece.

Always use as much lifestyle imagery as possible on your direct mail pieces. Pictures of people using your product or service the way you want them to helps prospects understand how your offerings will enhance their lives. Don’t just show readers what your product or service looks like – illustrate for them exactly how they’ll benefit from it.

Here are a few more tips for using imagery effectively in your direct mail:

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Use high-resolution images. A high-resolution image shows a lot of detail. Technically, it should be 300 dpi (dots per inch) in your image editor to print at this recommended quality. This makes your pieces look crisp and professional. On the other hand, low-resolution images are often blurry and look unprofessional.