Snail mail marketing that works - a few tips about advertising your firm by direct mail.
In these days of Internet and e-mail a lot of budding entrepreneurs are opting for a bulk e-mail marketing concept. Some painstakingly create their own lists. Some rent or buy them.
I am not suggesting that this is a bad way to go, but to market to a group of several hundred or fewer, especially if you're trying to reach a local market, I believe snail mail is best - and has a warmer, safer touch.
Why? Well, let's talk about safer first. If you receive an unsolicited piece of snail mailed junk mail in your mail box is it going to break your mail box? Is it going to cause the mail boxes of your friends who wrote to you to break as well? Is it going to make it impossible for you to receive or send any more mail, or worse yet, keep you from trying to complete your work? Of course not. It's going to do one of two things. It will either offer you a message you want to hear, do read about and perhaps respond to. Or it's going to offer you a message you don't want to hear, in which case it becomes garbage. A momentary annoyance. Nothing more.
If only the same could be said about online junk mail! I don't think I even have to go into what can happen online - viruses, worms, Trojan horses, identity theft, hijacking, and so forth.
This is why I say a direct mail piece via snail mail is less irksome to your prospect.
Now, about making it warmer. My suggestion, when possible, is to hand address the envelope. Instead of including your business name in the return address, trying just using your own name.
If you're sending out a few hundred, of course, and you need to get them right out (of course you do) then you're not going to be able to do it all yourself. Not and write with that same hand any time soon anyway. Call on your friends and family. Bring out the beer and pizza, set up your biggest table, or a borrowed table or two, turn on the music, divvy out the tasks and the piles of correspondence and get your mail out finished in one evening of fun and camaraderie.
But there's an even better way to get your direct mail piece read than that hand written letter. I've tried it and had much success. It's also less costly.
Send a postcard. A big one. At this point in time (but who knows about tomorrow?) a postcard costs 23 cents to have delivered. If you're sending out even two hundred of these in lieu of a letter and envelope you've already saved $14.
A 14 percent savings for something that gets a better response is a great business decision, wouldn't you say?
And who can resist reading a postcard? No one, if it's done right. Make sure you have a great big bold catchy heading, and plenty of white space. Make sure your point size is large enough so it can be read in the time it takes to think about walking to the trash can to dispose of it. If you're clever with your message and your layout, by the time that consumer gets to the trash can to dispose of it, she or he has decided not to.
