|
Paper Direct Mail Is Not Dead
By
Jim Logan
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.
back to top
back to
articles
|
