In fact, two or three of the right strategic relationships or new customers every month is usually the difference between huge success and mediocrity for most businesses.
In this article, I want to share how you can win meetings with almost anybody by understanding how you can use direct mail to boycott your noisy marketplace, be impossible to ignore and deliver a clear message that makes it difficult for your prospects to say no to.
Best of all, this can be achieved in four steps.
Let’s go through them.
1. Be Very Clear About Your Message.
Put all the whacky ideas that we’re about to discuss to one side and look at this from a fundamentals point of view; our aim is to get the right message in front of the prospect.
Before you even consider sending any direct mail – you need to ensure that you’re clear about how you can help the prospect, why they should respond and what they should do next.
Some key questions to ask yourself are:
- Why should they pay attention to you?
- Why should they be interested in your products/services over all the other potential options?
- How can you directly help them to get more of what they want?
Once you have a clear message and reason to respond, only then can you start planning your campaign.
2. Sourcing Your Leads (Who are the Recipients)
We need to work out who you’re going to send your direct mail campaign to.
As this campaign is built to be high-converting, we only want to mail people that are perfect potential customers and have a clear pain-point that you can fix.
Unless you can source highly targeted data, then I’d urge you to manually source the recipients for this campaign.
This may mean sitting down and researching 20 businesses that perfectly match your avatar.
It may be tedious, it could be outsourced, but the accuracy of your data is the biggest leverage point to the success of your campaign.
3. Sending Something That Cannot Be Ignored
Most businesses are looking for the cheapest ways to get meetings/win customers, they’re sending cold messages on LinkedIn, sending email blasts and doing the same stuff as 80% of everybody else.
They’re just part of the noise.
In order to stand out from this noise, you must be willing to put your hand in your pocket and invest in order to win an appointment.
The sooner you understand the value of a customer, the sooner you’ll realise how much you can invest in order to win an appointment/new customer.
Once you have these numbers, then it becomes a game of out-spending everybody else in order to win your prospect’s attention.
I’ll give you some whacky and proven ideas.
One of our most popular campaign is the ‘Hamster Box’ – that you can see in the image associated with this article.
This unique method is where we send a box that is disguised to look like it has a live hamster inside, but instead, it has a letter that highlights how we can help the recipient and pushes for a phone call/meeting.
It’s a huge pattern interrupt, and it always results in a conversation.
Another campaign is where we’re sending a mobile phone in a box along with a letter.
The letter asks the reader to “press the green button twice” if they’re frustrated by their low-performing direct mail results.
It then explains how our handwritten direct mail services work, shares case-studies and asks if we can set up a meeting so that we can discuss.
But by sending the mobile phone, it’s unique, it’s difficult to ignore and it bypasses the gatekeeper – we then also have the option of actually calling the mobile phone in order to get through to the prospect.
Up to now, we’ve sent 10 boxes to companies that send at least 100,000 mailings per year.
It has won us three meetings, with one meeting turning into a client.
I’ve heard all sorts of other stories; I’ve heard of sending a prospect a toilet bowl with a letter.
Other stories include sending a bunch of flowers every day until the prospect responds.
This is all about understanding how much you can invest and doing something unique that makes it difficult for the prospect not to respond.
4. Relentless follow-up
The harsh truth is, people procrastinate a lot.
You do, I do and your prospects do.
To just send your mailing and then sit back and wait for them to respond, you’d be leaving a hell of a lot of cash on the table.
You have to follow-up and make it easy for them to say “yes” by leaning 90% into the kiss.
It’s all about doing the hard work to make their decision easy – the path to the least resistance.
We have a rule of thumb that we follow up at least 15 times (through multiple mediums) before we give up … although that probably should be more.
—
These four steps could be your marketing strategy.
Source the right leads and strategic relationships for your business, understand how much each would be worth to you and then go above and beyond what anybody else is willing to do in order to win their attention and make it easy for them to say yes.
If you can send them something that is difficult to ignore, have a message that is difficult to say no to and do the leg-work to make it easy for them to say yes, then you’ll always have a reliable way to get new leads.