There are three huge advantages to mailing your current prospects/customers.
- You may already have their postal details – at the very least you’ll have their email addresses (and I’ll share a quick way to turn email addresses to postal addresses in a minute)
- You already have a relationship with these people – rather than having to write a campaign that overcomes the “who are you?!” objection.
- These people should be the most responsive – they know who you are, they have an interest in what you’re selling and if you’ve been doing the right direct-response kind of marketing that Chris teaches, then they’ll already see you as the expert/leader in your marketplace.
These three huge advantages make sending direct mail to your prospect/customers list your highest chance at generating huge returns.
In this article, I’m going to share the three-step process of gaining your email subscribers postal details, sending them a high-impact direct mail campaign and maximizing your results.
But before we get started, we need to address the fundamentals.
These should go without saying – but you’d be surprised how many people forget about these – and they are that unless you have a strong proposition, a reason for people to buy and a clear path to take action, then your direct mail campaign (or any marketing that you run for that matter) will fail.
As the famous ‘Market, Message, Media’ triangle suggests – unless you have your market and message defined, then you shouldn’t even think about the ‘Media’
This means that unless you know exactly what you’re promoting, the reason the readers should take action and how they take action – then you shouldn’t be thinking about how to contact these people
The number of people that just decide “I’m going to send some direct mail” or “I’m going to set up some Facebook adverts” without any plans or understanding of exactly what they’re promoting, is baffling.
Have you worked out your offer/proposition and why people should buy from you? Good.
Let’s jump into the three step-process to building an effective direct mail campaign to your prospects/customers.
Step One – Acquiring Postal Details
You should do what I’m about to share regardless of whether you’re planning on sending direct mail or not – gaining as much of your prospects/customers data is a smart thing to do.
That way, you’re not relying on one marketing channel to communicate with them – you can reach them through numerous routes.
Here’s what you should do.
Send a short email series to your email subscribers and offer them something physical for free.
This could be a copy of your book, it could be your print newsletter or it could be a brochure/piece of literature.
Drive these people to a simple form where they can give you their address and ensure it integrates with your CRM (to keep the process simple).
Sure, you’ll have to dip your hand in your pocket and invest to get your materials to the people that request them – but this can be outsourced and the cost should be marginal.
But this achieves two things.
Firstly, it gets your email subscribers postal details.
But secondly, it shows you who your responsive subscribers are and who has a strong interest in working with/buying from you.
It essentially builds you a hot list as they give you permission to send them stuff through the post.
Step Two – Preparing Your Direct Mail Piece
The most effective direct mail piece that you can send is a traditional sales letter.
People over-confuse this, they want to overdesign a brochure and insert business cards, fold-out calendars and all sorts of stuff that dilute the reasoning for sending the mail in the first place.
Keep it simple and send them a sales letter that gives them a reason to buy what you’re selling.
I don’t want to teach you to suck eggs – but there are three key fundamentals to this letter.
Firstly, you want to have an offer or a reason why people should take action straight away.
This could be a discount, it could be an added bonus or it could be something brand new that will naturally pique peoples interest.
Secondly, it must have a deadline.
This can either be a date/time, it could be limited places or it could be a natural deadline like an event taking place.
But having a solid deadline will be a big difference between your campaign succeeding and failing.
Thirdly, you must have a simple call-to-action.
You want to make it really easy for people to take action – whether they need to visit a page and fill in an application form or go to make a transaction.
Don’t make them jump through hoops to take action or just put a phone number on there that nobody answers from 5pm to 9am.
These three fundamentals along with a strong proposition of the offer and the reasons why people should buy will ensure you have an effective sales letter (which will become a major asset to your business).
Step Three – The Results Are in The Follow-Up
I discussed this in my ‘Five Most Common Direct Mail Mistakes‘ article, but I can’t stress its importance.
Simply sending your direct mail piece and then sitting back and waiting for the results is a sure-fire way to leave a lot of cash on the table.
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll get a spike of sales when it first lands, but if you follow-up correctly, you’ll get a consistent number of sales during the offer period with another spike at the deadline.
From my experience (and we send a lot of campaigns resulting in hundreds of thousands of pieces being sent from our mailing house) – the most effective follow up consists of a well-written email campaign and a phone call.
You can “go to town” and have multiple direct mail pieces and remarketing banners – but direct mail piece, email reminders and a phone call works incredibly well.
Some Quick Wins
That might sound like a lot of work, but there are probably some quick wins that you could take advantage of today.
Do you have a sales message written anywhere online? Do you drive people to sales pages? Or have an email offer that goes out?
If so, then you could copy this into a document and send this to the prospects in your pipeline that are yet to buy from you.
It’s a case of some copying & pasting, then sending to a mailing house to fulfil.
This doesn’t require much work but it will almost guarantee that you go to more effort than your competitors are.