You read it right. We’re talking about direct marketing the old fashioned way, using a stamp and envelope rather than sending out emails. Don’t laugh. It’s still a serious tool for connecting with prospects, especially in this day and age when 99% of all email we get is pure crap, offering to enlarge certain areas of our body or informing us an unbelievable sum of money awaits us in Nigeria – we have but to disclose our bank account number to access it.
Direct mail marketing, however, works as well as it ever did, which is to say pretty darn good. Here are a few tips for the budding direct mail entrepreneur.
1. Make your mailing piece look different or it’s headed straight for the trash bin. Don’t forget, real world mail boxes are clogged with junk too.
2. Your piece should have a single goal. Get the reader to visit a website, call a toll free number, download a report, whatever. Pick one but don’t expect prospective customers to do it all.
3. Make it exceedingly easy for the prospective customer to respond. Yes, some people still prefer fax, phone, snail mail – you should have them all available. What’s the point of doing a great job with your sales letter copy, getting them all hyped up, and then they can’t figure out how to get in touch with you.
4. One mailing is not a campaign. Statistics continue to show that it takes an average of contacting a person 7 to 9 times to make a sale. If you’re only planning to send one piece, chances are it’s not going to be very successful.
5. Don’t forget the call to action. Make it VERY CLEAR what action the prospect should take. Tell them what specifically what to do in writing. There’s no sense in making it difficult for them.
These are just a few of the critical ideas to keep in mind for direct mail marketing campaigns. No, they’re not obsolete and, yes, the marketers who approach it correctly can still make boatloads of money.
The Creating Wealth Team
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