It could very well surprise you to learn direct mail design is potentially even more crucial than the text of your sales piece, when it comes to getting results. The reason is straightforward: you won’t be able to make money from your marketing campaigns or other marketing pieces unless somebody responds to them. And you don’t get sales until the adverts are read.

And crappy design and tiresome copy mean your target market will simply not read your marketing pieces.

OK, there’s a high probability if you’re reading this you’ve been looking into direct response marketing and so you’ve most likely realised the content of your advertisements has to be written a certain way.

You undoubtedly are aware of the well-known AIDA formula, and the requirement for appropriate structure in your sales pieces.

Yet, crappy design can mean your copy never even gets a pair of baby blues on it at all, because the design pushes customers away.

So, now I’m going to share with you 10 elementary direct mail advertising tips which, if you really put them to work for you, will make a significant difference in your results.

But I do give fair warning to you: your graphic designer or creative marketing people will loathe everything I have suggested here. That’s OK, because I didn’t just invent this stuff.

It’s all drawn from important university-quality research presented in full in Colin Weildon’s Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes.

What I provide here is simply a list of his conclusions without all the in-depth commentary and statistics.

Layout Guidelines

1. Your headline goes at the top of the page, on the left, taking up perhaps two-thirds of the page-width. In the right hand corner, you can place an image. A human face is about perfect, and it must always have a caption. For many pieces your own face with the caption being your guarantee or big promise is great.

2. If you are going to have a picture full-width across the page, put it at the very top, even above the headline.

3. In the lower left corner, called a “fallow corner” you can put a second picture. Text here is frequently passed by, so a picture is going to draw the eye. And remember the caption!

4. Your call to action or “next page” arrow should be in the lower right hand corner. This is usually called the “terminal anchor”.

5. Go for a simple light background with dark text (stay clear of ‘reversed type’ like the plague). White background is OK, and cream or a light tone of yellow or gray even better. NEVER EVER use a background picture.

Rules for Copy

1. You can use a somewhat contrasting colour for the headline, say dark red or deep blue, but stay away from anything too bright. It might draw the eye to the ad … yet it may also distract the eye from reading it. As for the the font, either a serif font like Times, or a sans-serif font like Arial is OK.

2. Don’t use all caps. This is extremely challenging to comprehend. Either capitalize the first letter of each word, or just write them like a regular sentence. TEXT WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS IS PARTICULARLY TOUGH TO READ!

3. If you are designing for printed matter use a serif font like Corona, and if you are designing for the ‘net or reading off a screen, use a sans-serif font like Arial.

4. Make sure the first line of every paragraph is indented and the content fully justified (i.e. no ragged margin on the right). And absolutely do not have a ragged left margin! You need both margins straight up and down.

5. For the body copy, the ideal font size for comprehension is 11pt with a 13pt leading (pronounced ‘ledding’). Depending on your page-width this could mean using two or more columns, although that’s OK.

There they are: 10 very simple design tips you can set to work for you begining right now and enjoy immediate results. Just remember you need to be firm with your creative design folks!

They are pertinent not simply to your print media, but also to on-line media like web-pages.

I know much of this goes against the grain and might possibly feel a bit uneasy. But give them a whirl and I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.