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B2B Direct Mail Lead Generation Success Needs Planning, Testing, Measuring.
Is Direct Mail Useless for DMers?
Is direct mail useless at helping direct mail businesses
generate leads?
That's the question I was asked last week by a reader of Alan
Sharpe's B2B Direct Mail Tactics newsletter. Here is her...
Cost Effective Ways to Use Direct Mail
Cost Effective Ways to Use Direct Mail to Increase Investor
Leads
Direct mail is able to offer highly targeted, detailed sales
information to a large audience quickly and effectively.
Therefore, sending direct mail pieces to your investor...
Direct Mail Sales Letters Flow Better With Subheads
A subscriber to my newsletter asks: "Got any good pointers on writing great sub-heads?" Yes, I do. Here they are. Use subheads to draw attention to your copy Why do we use subheads anyway? Because you can’t just cover the important points in...
Eight Common Direct Mail Mistakes.
Some companies that use direct mail to sell their products and services are like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there. They repeat the same mistakes, and enjoy the same poor results. Here are their eight most...
Need New Direct Mail Donors? Look For These Three Qualities For Fundraising Letter Success.
New donors are a lot closer than you may think. And persuading
them to make that vital first donation need not be as hard--or
as expensive--as acquiring them in other ways.
But before you rent a list of names or drop anything in...
Postcard Direct Mail Marketing: 15 Ways To Grab Attention
If you use direct mail postcards to generate leads or sell a product or service, you need to create postcards that grab your prospect’s attention. The place to do that is Side A, the side that doesn’t have the stamp and address on it. Here are some...
Real Estate Marketing -- How to Measure Your Direct Mail Success
Article:
Eugene Schwartz, author of Breakthrough Advertising, said it
best: "There are no answers in direct mail except test answers.
You don't know whether something will work until you test it.
And you cannot predict test results based on past...
Smart Alternatives to Direct Mail
From LAND OF ODDS
We at Land of Odds get many questions about what glue to use with rhinestones and other beading and jewelry-making projects. We're craftspersons and silversmiths, and we have a shop where we sell rhinestones, beads,...
The Facts of a Direct Mailing List
It is a well-known fact that businesses cannot exist without
advertising. In fact, it is considered as the lifeblood of every
business. It is so important that businesses everywhere are more
than willing to spend thousands of dollars just to get...
Using Internet Direct Mail To Increase Your Company’s Profits
“I want to sell my company’s products on the Web, but how do I get potential clients to visit my site,” a client asked recently. The answer is a strategy that has proven extremely effective for many different businesses…Internet Direct Mail. ...
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It's In The Mail - Direct Mail is Alive and Kicking!
Compared to a lot of companies in our field we do a lot of direct mail – postcards, sales letters, promotions, announcements, lead generation. Between client business and ours, we’re averaging one campaign every two weeks; about 1500 pieces per mailing. We’re planning expansion to over 2000 pieces per campaign and will increase mailings to once per week. One particular business interest will grow to 10,000 pieces a month. We’re constantly building and adding to our mailing lists.
We’ve learned a lot along the way. We develop the entire piece in-house and use printing services such as 48hourprint.com for production. We discovered bulk and presorted mail a while back and our costs dropped. We developed a couple in-house processes with staff to form a production-line approach to stuffing, sorting, and stamping pieces for delivery to the local USPS office. By producing the piece and mailing this way, our costs are low enough to make it affordable – we can recover costs with the first client project.
We don’t currently use email marketing, ezine or newsletter stuff in our business. We have an auto-responder solution that’s never been used. I’ll probably begin a newsletter of sorts and use the auto-responder in the not too distant future. But until then, we haven’t used those solutions in our own business. Direct mail is effective enough that we haven’t felt the need to do otherwise. But that will change with plans to expand our business.
Our direct mail campaigns are targeted to business leaders of all sizes, from venture backed companies to local small businesses and F500 executives. We’ve found the results to be about the same for all targets. Also, we’ve used direct mail in the public sector and have had great success in lead generation efforts to meet with elected and
senior non-elected officials. We use Michael Bolyan’s Circle of Leverage technique and write copy using Doug Hall’s three pillar approach to customer communications. We shy from popular direct mail copy writing techniques that to me read like infomercials. Simple, to the point, and actionable – that’s about all we do.
For lead generation we integrate telephone follow-up, using the direct mail piece as a means to warm the cold call. Calling in follow-up is less painful than calling cold.
We write teasers on envelops, use Johnson boxes, and add the occasional PS, but none of them always and sometimes none at all; it depends on the piece, audience, and call to action. Overall we consciously stay sincere, direct, and offer compelling reason to take action. Some results are obviously better than others and everything must be tested continuously.
We often integrate a landing page with a marketing or awareness piece, keeping font, pictures, and copy consistent between the paper piece and the web landing. This transition the prospect from direct mail to the web is a seamless manner. Sub-domains are used to create unique URLs to market specific stories.
Direct mail has been very good to my buisness :-)
If you’re not using direct mail today, I urge you to try it. Use in-house resources to make the piece, find a good low cost printer for production, and leverage USPS bulk mail solutions to manage your cost. Direct mail is cost effective and it works.
About the Author
Jim Logan writes, speaks, and consults on the issue of revenue growth; working with clients to build their revenue the only three ways possible - getting more new customers, increasing the value of your average sale, and getting more repeat business. Jim can be reached at http://www.jslogan.com.
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