One of the big things about this show is we are tend to be devoted to small business and how to make money, save money with technology on -- but at the heart almost not really every business out there is sales focused. Sales is what keeps the machine running and you give into sales, of course, you have to have some marketing. In order to do marketing effectively there are a lot of different techniques and I thought today I would address some tips on Direct Mail Marketing.
Technology in itself can help you. I have some really successful campaigns. So here are some six tips that I found on the Internet by Steve Strauss. I wanted to share it with you. I think there are good. I think they make a lot of sense.
Tip number one, Think It Through. Think your Direct Mail Campaign through. In other words a Direct Mail Campaign can have multiple goals. One of them is to generate leads. So it is the way to get new prospects possibly in the door or around the phone, and hopefully some of those leads are going to close business and they are going to become new customers. You can use a the Direct Mail Campaign to update current customers and finally you can use Direct Mail to build your company brand. I guess there is another point and if you have old merchandise you want to get rid of, you might be able to advertise or sale something like that. So step number one, tip number one, is think through your Direct Mail Campaign very carefully.
Number two, Design a Killer Ad. We all get too much junk mails these days and so you have very little attention span from the person getting that piece of Direct Mail, but that being said, the average response to a well designed Direct Mail Pieces is about 3%. Now that may not sound like very much, but that's three new customer out of 100 but it could be substantially a lot of money. So if you have a 1,000 pieces come out that might be 30 new sales and that could be a lot of revenue.
In order to do that, to get people to open envelop, here are some tips. Be visually appealing -- people are kind of -- they want to read your price, they want to act on it, use bullet points whatever you need to do. Be written in an easy-to-read way, understand -- try to avoid using jargon that sort of thing, make that -- be clear and concise. So avoid the million dollar words, but be clear and concise, so that people can understand your message. Have a great opening, including obvious benefits, right away early in the Direct Mail Piece.
Tip number three, get a great list. Okay, I can't stress that enough. There is a lot of list brokers out there that can help you kind of narrow down the focus of your Direct Mailer. So want to spend your money getting your message to the right people. So know your demographics, know who buys your products, know who is interested in your service and spend that money on marketing directly to them. Another shotgun approach. It's just really doesn't pay off.
Step number four, get the reader open your letter and look there are some things that work better than the others. Odd shapes pieces of mail works better than one that looks like it's bid out by a computer. Hand written, that's really hard to do, people will open a hand addressed envelope much quicker than they will one with print. It was called chunky pieces. That's mailings with protruding inserts those trying to get open to lot more quickly. Odd shapes of the envelops will tend to draw a attention more quickly and even postcards are read much more frequently than opening a standard business type letter.
Tip number five, use some tricks. You have to grab people's attentions very, very quickly. If they open the letter you have been to reach out and literally grab them with the first few words of the piece. Offer benefits and more benefits, what can you do for them, what can your product do for them, what can your service do for them. I don't want to read all about how wonderful your company is, I want to know what you can do for me? What's in it for me? That's the point you got to get across in the Direct Mail Piece. Make a call to action. You need to get that reader to interact with you. So do that by making call going to website whenever they need to do to and your halfway home at that point. Use a P.S. at the bottom of the letter. People tend to be gravitate to the P.S. and read those. So make sure you do that.
And tip number six, it's not a one shot deal. Just because you have sent out one letter doesn't mean that that's where you stop at on Direct Mail campaigning. This really a process. I have been in sales many, many years and I can tell you that you have to touch people multiples times, not just one or twice but we are talking 5, 6, 7 times before they make a purchase and I think these are all very, very good tips.
There are ways to manage the cost if you do presorting and that sort of thing. So you want to take advantage of that, you want to take advantage of postal validation, the good list broker should make sure that the list is scrub. So make sure you are dealing with the clean Direct Mail List, but you follow these tips and you offer something a value that people need and want and you really pitch the benefits, I think you are going to close some more business. I think these are good tips to keep in mind.
A Direct Mail Campaign requires a lot of thought, a lot of planning, but the rewards are the really good and by the way if you follow up a Direct Mail Piece with the phone call you can almost double the results. So instead of going from 3% response rate you might be able to turn that into a 6% response rate.
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