How to contact offline clients?

As long as you're not mass mailing and in an automated manner, you're allowed to contact businesses with an offer. You need to Google CAN-SPAM Act.

To answer your question, every way you mentioned can be equally effective. Possible offline means of contacting:

- Email
- Phone
- Direct Mail
- In-Person
- Affiliate

Mass contacting, however, won't work. At all. Personalize your approach.

Tom

The "Best" way is going to vary from using one set of variables to another, including:
-The businesses that you're targeting
-The offer that you're presenting
-The services that you're offering
-The dollar amount you're charging
-The follow up sequence you're planning
-What your competition is saying/doing when targeting the same audience

The only answer that will give you conclusive results is testing.

Why are you pushing things so fast? Does it make any sense at all to try to sell anyone anything when you initially contact them???

This is probably the biggest issue most people that post questions like yours have. Why do you have to sell them anything at all? Have you ever bought something from SPAM email? Was it Viagra?

Here's an idea: slow the heck down, just try to start a REAL conversation with your prospective customers. Contact them the best way that fits. Make the initial contact short, to the point and 100% about them -- construct a message that is inquisitive so that you can qualify them to actually be a good prospective customer or not.

It's okay if they are not a good prospect! But you have to have some process in place that helps you to figure out who these good prospects are from the bad ones. If you are just contacting and selling to people you will have skipped over this important part of the process.

As soon as someone invents a scraper that tells me about someones business, what they need and how my service would bring them value I am all in ;-)

The best way to contact people? Sure any method you suggested
Sell them something? Now that's the rub isn't it?

Nobody can advise you on that without knowing what you're selling, who your market is etc...
Even then the "best way" often has more to do with you and your skills than anything.

Hi, my suggestion is that you try every method at your disposal and see which is most suitable for your situation.

Key Takeaway

I say this because the tactic that works for me may not be the best for you and vice versa.

Case in point....a few years back I was really bullish on telemarketing. I had a real knack for it - setting up several appointments in each sitting.

But what I came to learn about myself is that after getting the appointment I had no desire to actually keep the appointment or send whatever "information" the prospect requested.

Learn from My Mistake

Looking back on it, if I was smarter then I would have simply partnered with another offliner who was too shy for the phone but good at following through on appointments. But you know what they say...hind sight is 20/20.

On the other hand, with networking and face to face cold calling the human connection that my prospects and I made gave me incentive to follow through and continue building on the relationship.

So the key is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as knowing what motivates you -vs- what turns you off.

That being said here are some of the most common guerilla prospecting tactics:

• Emailing - Using a small foot in the door type offer to get the prospect's attention. Of course, you must be mindful of the CAN-SPAM act, as someone else has mentioned earlier. This can work for anyone who is patient and doesn't mind the monotony.
• Networking/Referrals - Going to meetup groups, lead generation groups and speaking at events. This works well for anyone who enjoys interacting face to face or who is able to tell others what you do without overly complicating things.
  Note: For the longest I put this off because I didn't have business cards or a website. Until one day I got fed up with that excuse and went without them. I started going and used the funds from those first few clients to invest in a site/cards.
  But the bigger lesson here is not to accept the self-talk that tells you to wait until you get x,y,z before you get started.
• Cold Calling ( In Person) - If you're the type of person who enjoys a challenge and who is numb to rejection, in person cold calling can be fun and very effective. Tip: If you go this route - it's not an absolute necessity but after a week or so of having people ask you to leave a card you might find it helpful to carry a nice stack of fliers and/or business cards.
• Telemarketing - By far, more folks seem to be intimidated by this one. But once you get the hang of it, I must say it is probably the quickest way to see results. In the beginning you will need an intro script as well as a rebuttal script but after a week or so of heavy calling you won't need them as much. When I started doing it, there were several folks on this forum who helped me with affordable scripts.
  Hint: If you are like me and enjoy the thrill of the hunt; more than the meal itself - do yourself a favor and partner up with someone to do the appointments for you.
• Mailers - If you are able to follow a pattern and keep to a regimen, sending mailers might be for you. But be prepared to exercise patience and test your copy though.
• Online Networking - I'm gonna be a bit lazy and lump blogging, forum posts, social media sites and LinkedIn together on this one. Sorry in advance .
  But here's the thing...if you're into outlining because you love it, there's no excuse for not doing this one.
  You can be shy and do it, you can be low on funds and do it and even if you're short on time - you can least carve out 15 minutes a day to do something. Heck if you're posting on the WF but telling yourself you don't have time for online networking...that should tell you something...

By the way, although I've stepped away from actively pursuing offline clients; there are still a few legacy clients that I manage SEO, design or webmaster stuff even to this day.

And interestingly, in each case they came from one of my comfort zone prospecting tactics (referrals and networking). So let that be a reminder to do what works for you...not necessarily what works for everyone else. One more thing...As is often the case in life, you might find that for best results you need to adopt multiple prospecting tactics.

Why do you ask?

For simple situations, there is always one and only best way.

The best way to sink a nail into a piece of wood is to place and hold the nail with the sharp part against the wood and hit it with a hammer on the flat end.

But there you have a lot fewer variables than you do in marketing.
Including the skills of the seller.

So, the best way to contact prospects is to create a system that tracks how you contacted the first time, what the results were, how you contacted the 2nd time and what results you got and how you contact them the nth time and what results you got. All the time, you also track other things: number of employees, time you contact it them, they have a website, what type of website, they pay for adwords, they pay for ads in local publications, what you sold them already,etc.

I always think people who're asking what's the best way to contact don't have a good idea on the businesses they want/think they should be targeting. Afraid of wasting time, they waste time by trying to determine what the best way of contacting them is.

So, I think most people should take a step back, figure out what they're selling, who would benefit, where to find the people/businesses that would benefit from what they're selling, and a fast way of sorting out the ones who're likely to buy from those who are not.

After a while, you'll see a pattern.

.
Here's a good company for voice broadcast: https://www.callfire.com Just don't violate the CanSpam act.

Also, any chance you got their fax number? (Are there any more faxes? That's one thing that always gets their attention, esp if you offer a 'prize' for responding.

I got something awhile ago that caught my attention - it was a note in a plastic bottle with an address label and a stamp.

Yes ,It would be spam .you should go with SMO .connect with social sites or make networks.

You could probably use the same method(s) you used to contact them
before they became clients.

Good Luck!

I would say the best method to use is all of them.

I think it will take an email to get some, phone call to get others, direct mail to get others.

But if you have a system that uses all of them in a systematic way you are much more likely to sell services to them.