You can’t handle the fulfilment end of a direct-mail campaign without considerable planning. If you’re asking respondents to request additional information, what are you going to send them? How soon do you want to mail the information out? What else will you do with the responses? In other words, how will you make maximum use of the names you have spent so much money to acquire?
If you’re a company with distributors or sales offices, it’s common to pass along the names of prospects, so that follow-up can be handled on the local level. This can be handled with e-mail or faxes. The quicker the response the better, since your speed in dispatching information can quite justifiably be viewed as reflective of your commitment to customer service. Why should respondents have to wait for materials? If you are mailing out product or samples, do you want that handled from your main offices? Many mail order campaigns depend on fulfillment houses, professional operations that handle the logistics of sending out materials to large quantities of customers. You provide the products and the prospects, they’ll take care of the rest.