Direct Mail Tips: What To Consider Before Sending Addressed Mail

Are the following statements true for you?

  • You have a message you want to send out to 50 – 500 potential clients/customers
  • You have a contact name and postal address
  • Timeliness is not an issue. If it takes your audience a few days, or weeks or even months before they take action, that’s ok

If you answered yes to the above statements, perhaps direct mail is a good choice for you.

I just want to be clear, when I talk about “direct mail”, I’m talking about a letter (maybe just a few pages) in an envelope with the recipients name and address printed on the front.

I’m not talking about glossy/colourful items that have been commercially printed.

mail-man

There are 3 reasons why sending a direct mail might be a better choice than alternatives such as a calling a meeting, making a phone call or sending an email:

  1. Scale
  2. Tangibility
  3. Attention

1. Scale

With direct mail you can communicate with a huge audience. 100 people. 1000 people. 10,000 people. It’ll only cost you about $1-$2 each. If you can make an average of $5 per letter you send out, you are making money.

2. Attention

Seeing an envelope in your in-tray with your name on it, ripping open the envelope and seeing your name at the top, and reading a message written for you, that’s personal. That gets your attention.

It has almost zero chance of not being opened. Can you say that about any other form of advertising?

3. Tangibility

You get to feel the paper in your hands. It exists. A whole lot of complicated logistics got it to you. You can throw it on your desk, and it’ll be there waiting for you later. If you delete an email, however, it’s gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Email is cheap. A letter has much more value.

3 More Direct Mail Tips:

  • Personalise the letter heavily with the receipients first name. Not just the envelope and internal address, put it in your headings and subheadings and 5 or 6 times in the body, and in the call to action at the end
  • Don’t use window envelopes. They look like bills and they don’t build up anticipation of something good. Also, they might not get opened until later in the month
  • Print your return address on the back. The letters that get returned can be removed from your database

Your thoughts?

Have your say in the comments below.

How We Created a Highly Targeted and Inexpensive Direct Mail Campaign and Achieved a Response Rate of 5.3%

The Story

The client was about to build a new pier that would contain space for 2 restaurants/bars/cafes.

We decided early on that the best bet would be to advertise locally because we knew that many of the owners of these restaurants/bars/cafe’s own several establishments and may have intentions to add to their portfolio or be open to re-locating to somewhere higher profile.

Objective: To motivate restaurant owners in the Tauranga area to consider moving premises to the yet-to-be-built Pier development

The 5 Step Approach (that I always use)

  1. Generate a list of ideas how to communicate with this audience
  2. Select the method that offered the best opportunity for Return on Investment
  3. Develop the creative as required
  4. Deliver the creative to the audience
  5. Measure the results

Download creative samples for this Direct Mail campaign (201 Kb .pdf)The 3 Reasons Why We Chose Direct Mail in This Case:

  1. Easy access to a list of addresses (I simply copy and pasted address details for 120+ restaurants/bars/cafes from the YellowPages.co.nz directory)
  2. Ability to customise the letter for each recipient so it appears the letter was personally written just for them (its easy to ignore a letter that says “Dear Sir/Madaam”, but it’s hard to ignore one that bears your name, and in this example, the name of your restuarant)
  3. Easy connection between MS Word and MS Excel by using “Mail Merge” to pump out the finished documents

Results

It is common for Direct Mail campaigs to generate about 1% response rate. This campaign achieved 5.3% response rate.

Could your business benefit from results like these? It’s time to hire your own marketing department (but at a fraction of the cost)

How can you turn the evil that-is-the-Readers-Digest-Sweepstakes into good?

Readers Digest - unopened

If you are human and you have a letterbox (or even a pile of bricks at the start of your driveway that someone could stick a letter into), then chances are, you have received one of these Readers Digest Sweepstakes letters.

If you haven’t, then I am amazed.

So, what can we learn from Readers Digest Sweepstakes letters that you can put to work on your business?

Lesson #1: There are ways to measure the effectiveness of your advertising, don’t give up because it seems too hard

This is the 96th time they have run the sweepstakes. Would they run it year after year if it didn’t work? No.

DSCF4632Do other companies run ads that don’t work again and again? Well actually, yes they do.

Many companies don’t bother to measure the response from their advertising. Most of them don’t bother because it seems to hard.

What a waste of money!  There are so many ways to measure the response for advertising, and doing so answers the essential question “is this ad providing us with a return on investment, or is it a waste of money?”

Anyway, you can bet your bottom dollar that Readers Digest a measuring the ROI from this little flyer.  It’s easy to do because they have pinned down the recipient to a very narrow, very precise, call to action.  You have to call a specific 0800 number and quote a code number.  Which brings us to lesson 2:

Lesson 2: Specify the action you want the audience to take, isolate that action so its easier to measure, and incrementally improve

DSCF4633This is genius because they could even test 2 different versions of the flyer at the same time by providing one 0800 number for one part of the country, and another 0800 for another part of the country.  The flyer that generates the most calls becomes the new default, and next time they can test another change.

(By the way, this is called “A-B testing” and I use it when I manage my clients Google Adwords campaigns so our ads become better and better over time.)

Another cool way to measure results:

Another way you could measure the impact of your ad is to use a mini-website instead of an 0800 number as the call to action, so you can see exactly how many hits you get via different promotions delivered to audiences on different dates.

Lesson #3: Is your advertisement different enough? Can you cram in some more cheesy gimmicks? (or is there another way?)

This letter uses a whole lot of techniques to make it stand out from the rest of the junk mail:

  1. The envelope looks crazy different
  2. It’s pink
  3. There is a mystery about its contents because it has a security scribble on the front so I can’t hold it up to the light to see what’s inside
  4. It makes up for the fact it’s not addressed to me with promises like “private: for the householder only” (that’s me!), “Open Immediately”, “Important Contents”, Urgent Notification (they wouldn’t say it if they didn’t mean it!)
  5. An official looking serial number is stamped on the bottom

What efforts have you made to make your ad stand out?

Actually, rather than cheesy gimmicks like this, I favour writing headlines that capture the audiences imagination, or tap into a deep psychological need, or create an itch that begs to be scratched. I’ve found that an effective headline can weed out the time wasters, lock into the true prospects, and give you a chance to deliver more message.

Lesson #4: You can’t sell your product or service cold, so sell only the next step in the sales process

This is where this letter really shines.  They don’t try and sell the Readers Digest Magazine. They don’t even mention it.  All they are selling is your chance to win a jackpot.  That doesn’t seem like selling at all!  It’s like they are doing you a favour for giving you the chance to claim a prize that has already been reserved for you!

Ok, ok, in this case, they have thrashed this concept to death, so many of us know that all that awaits us once we get through this hurdle is another hurdle and another hurdle until we are so exhausted that when they ask us to buy a magazine subscription we agree just out of pure exhaustion.

Anyway, focus on the lesson: This letter has one purpose: to get people to call the 0800 number and graduate through to the next step in the sales process.  Any information that does not achieve this objective does not belong in this letter.

Are you guilty of trying to cram information into your ads? Sure you are. We all are. Are you trying to tell them about your company, about your products, about what you can do for them, and trying to convince them to make a decision on the spot?

Yes, you probably are.

Can you boil down what you have to offer into one simple step that your prospects can take?

Sure you can.

Give it a shot.

Share your thoughts about this article below.

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

My Notes on “The Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes:Chet holmes

  • You can profoundly improve your company if you absolutely commit one hour a week in which you do nothing else than work on making the business much more effective.
  • We all get good ideas t seminars and from books and business-building gurus. The problem is that most companies do not know how to identify and adapt the best ideas to their businesses. Implementation, not ideas, is the key to real success.
  • To do’s, tasks, and deadlines must be assigned after every meeting. But the key is not to ask for too much to be completed. Make the gains small but constant. If you are having the meeting every week and you are making small incremental gains each and every week, think of the profound transformation you’re going to have in 52 weeks.


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Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham

My Notes on “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got” by Jay Abraham:télécharger (4)

Only 3 Ways to increase income:

  • Increase the number of clients
  • Increase the size of the sale per client
  • Increase the number of times that client buys from you

Difference between a customer and a client

  • A customer is someone who purchases something.  A client is someone under our protection.  So when a client wants to buy a bicycle for his son, what he really wants to spend precious time with his son to teach him to ride a bike, so its in his best interests if I sell him the best bike in the store that won’t crumple if he bumps into a tree.  I am a trusted advisor, so he’ll be back next year to get bikes for the whole family.


Continue reading “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham”