Thinking About Using Direct Mail?

I live in the boonies so post cards via snail mail works for me. First I target a prospective client. Then I choose a good one and send the a freebie via snail mail. 5-7 days later they get a post card sending them to a landing page. I follow up with a phone call. Works great.

I don't know a thing. I have searched, I also glance to this article and found out your questions can be answered here:
Read more: Direct marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks,
MrSS

What kind of company/service are you trying to promote with it?

what kind of company please explain in details

The biggest thing you need to be concerned about is list selection. With a good list, you could have a mediocre offer and sales letter and still get sales. Trust me, i would know about these things. And it's fast.

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas guys.
I guess I should have stated my question differently though:

"What are the biggest problems you face with YOUR direct mail?"

The reason I ask is I'm making a sales presentation to help a direct mail company get more business. I need to know more about the pain points mailers feel both *before* they commit to trying dm and *while* they are actively mailing.

Examples:
I've heard that:
- People are nervous about direct mail because it feels like a big/risky investment up-front.
- Existing mailers are constantly concerned about ROI and getting the lowest mailing costs.

Are there any other things I'm missing? Bigger issues?

Best,
Aaron

"What are the biggest problems you face with YOUR direct mail?"

For me personally reaching people on line costs me zero money.

Direct Mail well . . . more than zero.

lol What a stupid saying you need money to make money.

You REALLY are a negative thinker.

I used the computer at the library 10 years ago to start my online business. I am now a multimillionaire.

So nope didn't have money to start making money.

My biggest problem is the cost to create the sales letter. I outsource this to a local printing company, and usually depending on how many pages long my sales letter is, i can pay a very hefty price for it. If you want them to personize it with a prospect's/customer's name, then expect to pay alot more.

Make sure you check to dot all the I's and cross all the T's. Make sure you bring the mail to the post office yourself-- letter companies will rob you if they can.

There's two very small and quick books that will get you pumped up for a mailing. Read them. They are "The Boron Letters" by Gary Halbert and "The 12 Month Millionaire" by Vinny James. After reading them (could probably bang them both out in one sitting), you will be completely psyched to mail. Good luck.

I have found that post cards convert the best as a lot of sales letters don't get opened. Make sure that your sales copy is very compelling and has the benefits to your customer stated in bold or larger print. Clear and concise...

Target your audience, make sure that if you are catering to businesses they only go out to businesses etc. Some places can target specific businesses etc. so make sure that you are reaching your target market. Good luck!

I have a very competitive printing business that ships anywhere in the US. We canhandle anythign that gets printed....banners, flyers, business cards, signs tshirts, mugs, you name it, we can handle it and our pricing is excellent. We are a brokerage to be 100% forthright....but our pricing usually blows the doors off what you can find on big or small jobs. My website for Printing Crew is in my sig. Hope this is not inappropriate, if so let me know and I will remove it.

Thanks!

Unsolicited direct mail in isolation is useless.

First, the gatekeepers usually throw it out.

Second, if it does make it to the eyes of your prospect, they'll scan it quickly and if they don't have a need for it right that second, it's round-filed and forgotten.

Third, people need to see things many times (I've seen seven, nine, and even more quoted as the magic number) in order for it to have the credibility needed to take it seriously.

So if you go this route, pair direct mail with other marketing activities, and keep at it with a targeted prospect list. Funny thing is, once people have seen an advertisement seven or eight times, they start thinking it's been around a lot longer than it has. So there is some payback on the back end.

My biggest concern starting out is cost I want to receive ROI on every mailing so with that said I would use postcards. What has held me back is the time waiting for results u wait up to 5 days 4 them 2 get the mailing then u have 2 wait 2 see if they respond

IF you have money to burn I would say go for it.

BUT if you are just starting out there are TONS of ways to reach your target money for free.

I built a multimillion dollar business and the ONLY advertising I did was to post on forums for FREE! Except after I got going and made enough money I paid $300/mo to be a sponsor of a forum.

I think MANY business fail because they run out of money correct? Well if you never spend any (or VERY VERY little) to start you will almost never run out of money and you will have time for your business to grow.

Some well known pain points are:

1) Writing the sales letter
2) Selecting the list
3) Re-renting the list (if it was successful)
4) Cost to mail out the letter
5) Possible copywriting costs (if you hire a copywriter)

Most people not only fail at direct mail, but at lead generation as a whole because they don't do it right!

You can do email, direct mail, postcards or even drop off flyers in person and if you do it right, you'll get leads. If you do it wrong you won't, or you'll only get a couple, but certainly not what you could get.

There are direct mail companies that make many millions a year from direct mail. The have highly experienced copywriters too. But again, most people fail at direct mail because they do it wrong!

Yes, you can send out thousands of emails at zero cost. I own 3 companies and get a tremendous amount of this spam. Not one of them was written correctly. Not one of them compels me. Instead, it's the same old crap ... we can get you on the first page of google, we can optimize your website, we can get you on Google Places, etc.

Ya, okay, that's going to motivate me. Now, of the 10 emails all saying the same thing I got this week, who should I call? NOT! The business isn't going to respond to any of them! Not one!

On the other hand, lead generation marketing done right pulls a lot of leads. We have a piece that pulls 6% to 20% over and over again! That's because I know how to do lead generation correctly.

Because we have our pieces in place correctly, it doesn't matter if I do email, postcards or direct mail, we get leads. However, I will tell you piece for piece, we pull more leads from direct mail (higher lead ratio) than any of the other mediums. That makes the cost insignificant!

People who complain about the cost to direct mail complain because they don't know how to create lead generation pieces that pull in leads. And they are right, the cost of mailing crappy marketing pieces is very high!

It all boils down to this. A correctly created piece pulls, and incorrectly created pieces doesn't. Over 95% of what I've seen from people in this busines is wrong. It's no wonder people are struggling so badly! Especially since it requires leads to make sales.

This topic of "how do I get more leads" is consistent throughout the forum. You can hardly go a week without somebody new posting another "how do I get leads" post.

It's because I'm a master at lead generation marketing that I've been so darn successful in business and have been able to help my clients build their business. I use those principles in so many areas in addition to lead generation pieces ... phone conversations, mailer follow up calls (this doubles my leads from the mailing campaign), process marketing pieces, website, sales presentation and so on because these are the key to generating leads and presenting the product.

My first offline business I owned was an insurance agency. Talk about an incredibly competitive market place! At first we struggled, but once I got smart and studied everything I could on lead generation marketing we started growing at the tune of over 500% per year!

After I sold the agency I went into the business of helping other insurance agencies grow their business. In 1994 I wrote two marketing training manuals for the insurance industry that many agencies still today say is their marketing bible.

In 1993 I helped a software company go from $20,000 of business on a good month to doing $200,000 30 days later to doing over $1,000,000 of business 4 more months later. They became the #1 product on the market in less than a year and were bought out 11 months after I started working with them for millions!

It was the lead generation strategies that put them over the top. It was the lead generation strategies that put my agency over the top. It was the lead generation strategies that put the other agencies and other businesses I've worked with over the past 25 years over the top.

My point in sharing early successes is to show I've been doing this for a while, back when there was no internet and the ability to send out thousands of emails at no cost and then hope somebody responded. Back in those days you had to be good or you'd go broke trying. I think the internet has made people lazy! Rather than learning how to do lead generation marketing correctly, just send out 1000 emails and spam all of these businesses with crappy offers and emails hoping someone will respond.

And these are the same people who are telling businesses they can help them increase their leads and make more sales. Do you see anything wrong with this?

Please excuse my passion on this topic. It's just that over the past 2 years I've helped a lot of people in this business go from frustration and struggling to making a nice income and the solution for most has been helping them put together correctly created lead generation pieces. I love helping people.

Now I'm going to self-promote. I did a WSO on lead generation mistakes and strategies. I did this because I just cannot answer how to do this correctly in a thread. The WSO is getting rave reviews with more coming in. I just got another one today by email ...
The worksheet in the WSO is pure gold! It's what I use for us and what I use when working with clients to help them with their lead generation strategies.

It's your business and your financial future. Do what you wish ... spend the $27 for this WSO which is grossly under priced, or keep doing what you're doing and keep getting the same results you're getting. Just remember, no leads, no sales! And me, I hate cold-calling if I can at all avoid it (that doesn't mean I don't do it).

I will do cold-calling to research an approach and product, which I also discuss in the WSO. And just wait until you see the cold-call script and what I do here. Powerful! And very effective.

I absolutely love checking my email every morning and seeing all of those leads and my post office box to pickup all of the reply card leads after sending out a marketing piece. All I can say is, "yahoo"!

The link is in my signature for the WSO if you're interested.

Bradley

P.S. Whether you purchase the WSO or not doesn't affect my income at all. I did this WSO to help people make money in this business.

Plus, if people are doing lead generation marketing correctly they'll be able to help more businesses AND we won't have so many pissed off businesses complaining about all of that other crap they continue to receive in their inbox.

WHOA!

So that whole post saying 95% of people are doing it wrong so they should buy your WSO?

ok cool


Bradly I am not understanding this part of your post P.S. Whether you purchase the WSO or not doesn't affect my income at all. I did this WSO to help people make money in this business.

So your WSO is free?

My opinion is you could have made your post and given ACTUAL helpful hints. It would have helped establish yourself to fellow warriors as a caring knowledgable
person and then we would have looked at your sig an then clicked over to your WSO and perhaps made the purchase.

Actually that is what I was thinking, 100% truth, until I saw almost half your post tells us about your WSO.

To me when all your post does is say over and over that almost everyone else is doing it wrong and OH by the way I have the solutions for $27! just lowers the respect forum members have for you.

Perhaps it hurts the credibility of someone who is saying how great their copy writing is when their copy writing looks more like SPAM then a helpful post.

And also come on PLEASE people do not buy it when you say HEY I am NOT doing this for the money I am doing it to help you oh BUT you have to pay for it.

Patrick,
Go look at all of the posts I've done. I've provided a lot of help on this topic for a lot of people.

I too have read posts that were really good until they self-promoted. Then it made me wonder if there was any truth to the rest of it or whether they were just trying to sell their product. I'm with you 100% on that.

I got so wrapped up on the topic I didn't even think about that. Instead I shared my views to this topic and I provided a solution, which unfortunately was a self-promotion. I'm certain that if I had promoted somebody elses product the outcome would've been quite a bit different. The problem is, I don't know of another product out there that teaches what I teach in the WSO.

I see so many people struggle in this business with the primary problem being their lack of being able to create leads. That's why I did that WSO. It took me months to do it because of how busy I am, but I took my time anyway to do it to help others.

Patrick, there are people out there who do things like this to help people.

Just look at all of the people in the forum who take their time out of their day to reply to threads from people who are asking for help. That's because they like to help people, otherwise why would they take time away from their family or making money to do it?

There are a lot of good people in here. Please, go back and read my other posts and I believe you'll see that I'm also one of those people who likes to help people, even with as busy as I am.

Plus, I believe people would like to benefit from my 25 years of marketing to local businesses. I've got a lot of experiences, acquired a lot of expertise's and still today continue to study to continue to improve my skills.

I already explained why the price on it.

We all have opinions and our own views to things. I respect yours. Thank you for sharing it.

Bradley

Wow guys! This has turned into an awesome thread! Thank you for all of your feedback, ideas, and experiences.

Awesome. Hope your direct mail project works out well for you.

Direct mail is expensive, and in my experience requires some kind of gateway to work or else the piece will be thrown away before it reaches the eyes of your prospect.

What do I mean by a gateway? A means of getting through the gatekeepers, and not being marked as junk mail.

Targeting your mail effectively is a means of creating this gateway. Think about this: during the weeks of election periods, people will read candidate pamphlets they get in their mail. Any other time, they're junk. Or, as I once read, if you receive a note from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court saying that speeding tickets are illegal, and if you send the info over the Justice will nullify yours, you'll respond. The key is in the pain the prospect is experiencing, and how well you approach that.

In my experience, letters work better than postcards for professional services. If you can make the letter a little weird--a different size, a strange bulkiness--people are more likely to open it.

Vagabond,
I was talking to a consultant with his mailing piece. He used the lumpy idea with a bite sized 100,000 bar in it.

It only produced a few leads.

While the lumpy approach got their attention and got it opened, the marketing piece itself still made the critical mistakes that affected his outcome.

It wasn't until he created a marketing piece that was compelling the he started pulling in the leads.

In direct mail, getting it opened is absolutely an issue that must be strategized because if it goes into File C and doesn't get opened then there's no chance of creating a lead.

However, once it does get opened then the marketing piece needs to pull them in and make them want to contact you.

1) Get it opened - You presented a number of ways to do this
2) Get it read - Compelling self-serving headline and body copy
3) Get them to take an action - Offer & Call to action

Success requires a good marketing strategy with a good marketing piece.

Bradley

I have used direct mail successfully for many years this is a quick summary of what i do

1. identify my targeted market by describing who my prime client would look like
Example when my primary market was EIC filers (People who claimed Earned Income tax Credit) my ideal target was single women, between the ages of 20 - 30, earning between $10,000 to $25,000 per year with at lest one to two children

2 I would then identify what is they really wanted... and then make a bulleted list

3. Then turn each into a benefit. For instance one thing this market was hungry for was there refund money fast. So instead of saying 24 Refund service I would say Get the Biggest and Fastest refund allowed so you can have quick cash in your hands now or instead of saying Guarantee I would say get our peace of mind so you can sleep like a baby Guarantee

4. i would also offer a strong call to action something like for those who act before ..x date you will receive Xyz just do ... now

5. I would call my list broker and then get a list based upon my ideal client

This has worked well for me in the past. Also a letter then followed up with a series of post cards on average produced best results. One more having a lump in the envelope helps get it opened ( key, tiny little dolls, cheap pens, etc - I have done all and more)

One more point ugly does sale, hand written letters (or least that look like it) - often sometimes called yellow letters do work...

Which is better for direct mail? Letters or postcards?

I totally agree that it's all in the leads. If you have a million visitors to your site in a day but none of them interact with it or stay for more then 7 seconds what good is it? If you can capture them as a lead then they know you can do it for them.