Compared with placing a classified ad in the newspaper, which takes nothing more than a single phone call to the paper’s advertising department, putting together a direct mail promotion is a bit more involved. Here’s a step-by-step checklist to get you started:

• Planning. How many direct marketing pieces do you plan to mail? How much will you have to spend? How long will it take to mail and test your direct mail piece? For budgeting purposes, figure a cost of $500 to $700 per thousand pieces mailed for printing, postage, and mailing list rental. You can spend anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars on design and copy, unless you write and design the piece in-house. Freelance direct mail copywriters charge anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 to write a sales letter, depending on length and complexity. For a large mailing (5,000 pieces or more), allow at least eight weeks for copywriting, design, printing, ordering your lists, and mailing.

• Product. Which of your products or services do you plan to promote in a direct mail offer? You may want to save money by advertising two or three products in one mailer, but beware: direct mail is most effective when selling one thing at a time. Catalogs are the exception to this rule.

• Offer. The direct mail offer details what the recipient gets when they respond to your mailing — and how he or she should go about it. For a company selling enterprise software to IT professionals, for example, the offer might be a free white paper that can be downloaded as a PDF from the company’s Web site. For financial planners, the offer is typically a free consultation at the prospect’s house. If you are selling a product directly from the mailing, you should consider offering an unconditional money-back guarantee. The longer the guarantee the better: 90 days usually generates more orders than 30 days. And surprisingly, the prolonged guarantee period decreases rather than increases refund requests.

• Market. Approximately 300 million people live in the U.S., but not all of them are your target market. Who are your ideal prospects? Home owners? Senior citizens? Plumbers? Golfers? If you are a chiropractor living in a small town with a population of 20,000, you might think you have 20,000 prospects, but you don’t. Only those residents who have back pain or other problems requiring chiropractic adjustment are prospects, and of that group, some may shun chiropractors in favor of their own doctors.

• List selection. Once you have defined your target market, you have to identify and rent the most appropriate mailing list. You can obtain one from a mailing list broker.

• Copywriting. Make no mistake, copy is king in direct mail marketing. If you have little understanding of promotional copywriting, study other DM packages you get in the mail. Write your direct mail sales letter in plain, simple language. Start by talking about a problem the reader has (e.g., he is mired in debt). Then offer your product or service as a solution (e.g., mortgage refinancing, credit repair service, home equity loan).

• Design. Unless you are proficient with desktop publishing and understand postal regulations, you will need a graphic designer to lay out your copy in the desired direct mail format. One place you can find graphic artists online is at www.elance.com. Make sure the designer you choose has DM experience; ask to see samples. The main objective of direct mail design is to make the copy enticing and easy to read. Avoid tricks like reverse type (white type on black) or colored type against a colored background, both of which make for difficult reading.

• Production. All elements of a direct mail campaign need to be printed in the quantities desired and then collated, assembled, and stuffed into envelopes and sealed. What’s more, postage must be affixed and the mail sorted before being brought to the post office. Some local printers offer mailing services, though your best bet may be through a letter shop. (Look under “Letter Shops” or “Direct Mail Services” in your local Yellow Pages, or Google “letter shops” in your area.)

• Key coding. The list broker can “key code” the reply element of your direct mail piece, so that when leads and orders start coming in, you know which mailing list generated the most inquiries or sales.

• Split testing. An A/B split is a key-coded test that measures one mailing or mailing variable against another. For instance, if you were doing a direct mail campaign to promote a brand of light beer, you could test two headlines: “Tastes Great” versus “Less Filling.”

• Measuring results. You can track results from reply forms with key codes. For telephone responses, you can key-code the phone number by instructing callers to dial a specific extension or ask for “Betty.” On the Web, you can direct traffic to two different URLs and track the unique visits, leads, and sales generated by each.

• Calculating break-even and ROI. The break-even point for direct mail is the number of paid orders or response rate needed to cover the cost of the mailing. The return on investment, or ROI, measures how your actual results compare with the break-even point. An ROI of 150 percent means you generated $1.50 in net revenue for every $1 you spent on the mailing.

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