How Much Does a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign Cost?

Direct mail campaigns, if executed properly, can have great returns for self storage facilities.

They help spread awareness and, with proper timing, can even lead to a healthy increase in rentals.

But if you’re not familiar with direct mail marketing for self storage, you may have a hard time coming up with a cost-benefit analysis. After all, how much does it cost to send mailers to all of your potential storage customers?

Let’s take a look at what direct mail marketing is and how much it costs. We’ll even cover some tips at the end!

What is Direct Mail Marketing?

Have you ever received a postcard in the mail from a business?

That’s the result of a direct mail campaign.

These campaigns can be targeted specifically to your market area without the risk of catching eyes outside your market the way online ads can sometimes do.

Furthermore, some studies show that direct mail campaigns have an average conversion rate of around 9 percent (though this rate is likely to be much lower for self storage).

So, how much does Direct Mail Marketing cost?

The cost of a direct mail campaign can vary from as low as $320 to as high as $37,000 (or even more!).

Fortunately, the USPS has a handy tool that helps break down the costs of such a campaign.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of variables to consider.

To start, here are some of the variables you’ll need to consider:

1. How many mailers you send out. This will largely depend on the density of your market. You may target your entire market, or you may only target select neighborhoods if you’re being more strategic, and this can dramatically change the cost.
2. How you design the mail pieces. If you hire a professional to design whatever you’re mailing to potential storage customers, the cost will go up, but the presentation will probably be better.
3. What type of mail you send. Postcards are the most affordable and, according to the USPS, the most read.
4. Whether you use EDDM or a purchased list. Purchasing a list will cost you, but using EDDM (Every Day Direct Mail) from the USPS, which targets zip codes, is free.

Below are some base prices listed in the USPS’s calculator and from our own research to help you get started, though we highly recommend checking out their tool when it comes time to actually plan out your direct mail marketing campaign for self storage:

Example Direct Mail Campaign Costs

Let’s make a pretend self storage direct mail campaign.

In this example, we’re targeting 4,802 homes in a roughly 3-square-mile area of Knoxville using EDDM and postcards designed in-house using free templates.

This example direct mail campaign for our self storage facility is going to cost us a total of $4,528, rounded up to the nearest dollar.

Here are the details of our campaign:

• We used postcards printed at $0.45 (the high end of the range)
• Using EDDM, the USPS is charging us $0.203 per household
• The USPS charges us $0.29 per postcard (the high end of the range)

Here’s the breakdown of the math:

1. Printing: $0.45 x 4,802 = $2,160.90
2. EDDM Cost: $974.81
3. Cost to Send: $0.29 x 4,802 = $1,392.58

Is a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign worth it for self storage?

Maybe “How much does a direct mail campaign cost?” isn’t the right question.

Let’s be honest: no one wants to spend $4,528 dollars on marketing for a single round of postcards.

But before we decide if a marketing strategy is worthwhile, we need to consider the return on investment. It may look like a big price tag upfront, especially for only a 3-mile area, but we don’t really know how worthwhile it is unless we determine what the risk-reward metrics are.

Let’s take our above example. What result do we need in order for this direct mail marketing campaign to be profitable?

To know this, we need to determine our average lifetime customer value.

Determining our average lifetime customer value
This value can be as specific as it makes sense for our campaign, too. If we’re targeting student-heavy neighborhoods with a student storage-focused special rate or program, then we don’t really care about the average lifetime value of our non-college-aged customers, for example.

In this case, let’s keep our math general. Our 4,802 households are being targeted purely because they’re in our geographical market range.

If we know that the average length of stay at our facility is about 10 months, and the average monthly rent our tenants pay is around $100, then that’s an average lifetime customer value of $1,000.

For more help determining this value, take a look at this mini-guide.

All right, so our average lifetime value is $1,000. Our marketing campaign cost is just under $5,000. This means we need at least 5 rentals from the 4,802 households to break even.

Of course, there’s always an argument to be made for awareness campaigns where your goal is just to stay in the market’s mind for when they DO need a self storage unit. But that’s a lot harder to track.

Tips for your storage facility’s direct mail marketing

You must be pretty committed to using direct mail marketing if you’ve made it to this point!

If that’s the case, let’s go over some ways you can refine the campaign to make it suit your needs.

1. Refine your targets. Make informed choices about which mail routes to target with EDDM. It may be more beneficial to send fewer postcards but target new neighborhoods or to target student-heavy areas right before the semester ends. The USPS actually gives you age and income stats for the routes to help.
2. Consider timing. Don’t send out a burst of mailers right before the snowiest part of the year. Instead, maybe save it for spring cleaning time when folks might need storage space.
3. Use QR codes with tracking URLs. Adding QR codes with tracking will make sure you know if a lead came to you through the mail campaign.
4. Add tracking to any phone # on the mailers. Same concept as the QR codes. If there is a phone number on your postcards, it should be a number with tracking.
5. Make the design clear and easy to read. Make sure text isn’t sitting over photos that make it hard to read, don’t use crazy font styles, and don’t clutter the mailer with graphics. Use moderation!
6. Keep your message on-point and relevant. It’s important to know your market so that you know how to market to them. You should also ensure you are focusing on a call to action that your community will actually respond to rather than things they won’t understand or care about.

Here are some of my other favorite posts to check out!

• How Much Are Google Reviews Worth? 
• Google Ads: Does Your Self Storage Facility Need Them?
• 100% Money-Back Marketing - Self Storage Referral Programs

At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.