When most marketers think outbound marketing, they think emails, paid advertising, and other digital campaigns aimed at engaging their target audience. We’ve written at length about how effective those tactics can be — but today, we’re talking about a different type of marketing campaign.

Direct mail is one of the very first outreach strategies employed by businesses. It’s also a tactic that many modern businesses have abandoned in favor of more efficient, cost-effective digital tactics. But much like direct dial communication, direct mail is by no means outdated: 39% of customers say they’ve tried a business for the first time as a result of direct mail marketing.

For today’s post, our friends at Topline Film are here to share some of their most memorable direct mail campaigns. Keep reading!

5 Unique B2B Direct Mail Campaigns from Topline Film

As a video production company that sells to other businesses, we have been doing B2B outreach for almost a decade. As is the nature of outbound marketing, some of our campaigns have been more successful than others.

So, we thought we’d share a few of our most memorable outreach campaigns — some that worked, and some that didn’t — and explain what valuable lessons we learned from each one. Let’s get into it!

1. Toolkits

The first of our creative outreach ideas was one of our most successful. We sent packages to 50 of our top prospects, with each package containing a mini-toolbox. The catch was, we removed a set of pliers from each toolbox, and sent a message which read, “Something missing from your marketing toolkit? We have it!”

The campaign was a success, as it generated a lot of positive buzz — and more importantly, it generated revenue. The toolkits led to us booking five meetings, ultimately winning two new customers. The whole campaign cost us £400, and we generated over £50,000 in revenue. A great return!

2. Cookies

As we said earlier, not every outreach campaign is a winner — and our next example is one that didn’t pan out as well as we hoped. The idea was simple enough: we sent 100 branded cookies featuring pictures of our office dog to 100 sales prospects.

Unfortunately, the cookies seemed to annoy many of the prospects we sent them to. Maybe they didn’t taste great (we never sampled them!) Some arrived broken, while others arrived at the wrong address. We even got some follow-up calls, including one from a prospect who told us the cookies were a tacky gesture. The campaign cost around £250, but didn’t directly generate any new opportunities for our business.

3. Organic Jam

This next idea stemmed from a campaign in which we explored using video (and our sister SEO agency’s services) to help improve organic traffic. So, we sent jars of organic jam to our top 50 prospects, including a note which asked them if they needed help with organic search.

Crickets. Either the “organic” theme was lost on people, or they simply weren’t in the market for a solution to help them with organic search traffic. For whatever reason, the campaign didn’t work. We spent around £250 and received nothing in return.

4. Video Distribution Guides

For our next outbound campaign, we converted our guide to building a video distribution strategy into a printed book. We sent this guide to 30 individual prospects. The purpose of this campaign was to provide prospects with a useful piece of content to leave on their desks. In other words, we wanted to offer value while also keeping our brand front of mind.

This campaign cost us around £170 and resulted in two meetings, one of which converted into a customer. That customer has spent over £30k with us and also referred us to two new customers. In other words, this campaign was a great investment.

5. Personalized Video Cards

This last example was by far our most expensive campaign — but also our most lucrative. We sent out 200 personalized video cards which mentioned each prospect by name and included a quirky explanation of our video production process. These cards were novel and memorable; it’s not every day people receive a video in the mail.