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Paper_Direct_Mail_Is_Not_Dead
| Paper Direct Mail Is Not Dead
I recently witnessed a conversation about the “death” of paper
direct mail due to the “life” of web presence and blogs. I’m not
exactly sure why, but someone seems to declare the “death” of a
marketing technique every few months…I guess that’s how some
consultants stay employed – announce the “death” of something
and create the “life” of something new. Anyway, I disagree with
the notion paper direct mail is dead and as such thought I’d
share how we integrate paper direct mail into our marketing,
sales, and lead nurturing systems.
We do a fair amount of direct mail – postcards, sales letters,
brochures, etc. – to generate sales leads and provoke interest
in our and our customer’s services. We integrate paper direct
mail with our web presence to provoke ongoing interest using
unique landing pages specific to each direct mail piece and
routinely use sales letters to generate leads.
Provoking Ongoing Interest To warm suspects for sales
opportunities what we do is create a direct paper mail piece –
postcard, letter, brochure, etc. – and send it to a list of
targeted employees at specific companies we’ve identified as
part of a customer profile. We provide a unique URL to continue
the dialogue from a particular subject within a paper direct
mail piece – in essence we ask a question in the paper direct
mail piece and answer the question on a landing page. The
landing page continues the flow of information from the printed
source. We are careful to keep the font, color, graphics, etc.
the same on the landing page – this bridges the paper direct
mail to our web presence.
Example: We did a direct mail postcard for a customer not long
ago. The piece begged the question of how outside counsel spent
their time; a graphic included two business people standing by a
water cooler. The URL that continued the dialogue of managing
outside counsel was watercooler.customersdomain.com.
We accomplish two things by employing landing pages this way: we
track specific interest of our customers and prospects (we track
stats for the landing pages and correlate it to a mailing
schedule), and bridge suspects to the “stickiness” of our web
presence. Our belief is if you can hold an audience, you can
continue to market to them. We’ve found this technique highly
effective in bringing prospects to our site.
We can easily test messages and service offerings with this
technique.
Sales Letters Within the past year we have successfully used
paper direct marketing to position and sell one of your
customer’s web-based service to local governments – city, school
district, special district, county, state. Using a one page
letter with compelling content and overt calls to action to meet
face-to-face, we have successfully met with 30 county
Supervisors or Executives in the state of California.
As background, there are 58 counties in California and in the
campaign I’m citing we only targeted the 40 largest. Our paper
direct mail campaign was designed to generate face-to-face
meetings. The results of this campaign were meetings with 30
County Supervisors or executives (Chief Administrative Officer
or County Counsel - the most senior non-elected officials in
county government). From letter to meeting was one phone call.
Our campaign had a success rate of 75%! Paper direct marketing
works.
The average annual value of each customer we targeted in this
campaign was $200K. Our cost of the paper direct marketing
campaign was a one page letter, envelope, and $.37 stamp sent to
approximately 350 people. We printed the letters and envelopes
in our office and had two people assigned to follow-up. The
first customer we earned from this campaign paid for this effort
many times over.
We have a campaign underway at this time targeting the 100
largest school districts in the US. We’re experiencing similar
results.
And, in case you’re wondering….Yes, we’ve used the same
technique in approaching F1000 senior executives and have
enjoyed similar success.
Paper Direct Mail is Alive and Thriving In this emerging era of
Internet use, paper direct mail remains relevant and happily
coexists with traditional websites and blogs – neither is an
either or decision. All have an important use in sales and
marketing, and paper direct mail remains relevant…it still
works.
About the author:
Jim Logan is founder of Accelerate Business Group, LLC, a
revenue growth company. Accelerate Business Group partners with
their customers to build 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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