Targeting Your Business Direct Mail for Branding
When You are looking to Zero in and target exact executive in specific businesses, not many marketing methods can beat what the US postal services have to offer. There are nearly unlimited types of compiled lists for business prospecting offering thousands of filters including everything about the business like corporate credit, debt, buyers title, the bank they use with number of accounts, and more.
Differences between compiled and response mailers
When sending Business-to-Business Direct Mail there are many more compiled lists than response lists. By using compiled lists you can reach out to the most potential customers and will do well when the people on your list match the profile of your ideal customer. Mailing to people who do not match your ideal customer can be disastrous. Think of the results from sending out a badly targeted Business-to-Business Mail Campaign software offer for Apple computers to medium sized businesses and generating a zero response because their software program did not run on Apple computers. Just switching the criterion from medium sized to businesses with apple computers would hit the mark without changing the cost of the list.
Business-to-Business Branding in Direct Marketing is no simple task to undertake but when done properly there will be no question in your prospects mind who to use when your services are needed.
It isn't 100% necessary for the branding item to have everything to do with your company's services, what is of the most importance is the perceived value and desirability, and above all, how usefull it is on a regular basis. If the promotional item relates to the product that is all well and good but of secondary importance to how often it will be viewed.
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On the other hand you must be careful with premiums because there are companies such as defense contractors and subcontractors that have policies to forbid employees from accepting gifts from vendors.
Don't Send That Rolex Too Fast - Find a happy Medium
Business Buyers in large corporations may not want to be perceived as accepting a gift or bribe for giving the vendors their business so a rolex is out of the question, you know what we mean here. they also may think that an expensive gift will inflate the price of the product they are considering, and getting the product at the lowest price possible would work out better than a free gift because the corporate employee increasingly looks good to management being a good purchaser.
This suggests that if you do give a branded gift though the mail for promotional purposes, keep it's value just above what you think (or know) your competitor is sending.
For your B2B Direct Mail look for prospects that demonstrate interest in your topic, if you are promotion a seminar on quality management, start with engineers and managers in manufacturing but don't overlook lists of people who attend seminars, subscribe to specific journals or are members of societies or associations that fit the bill.
Preparing Your Business Prospect Mailer
Any And All Targeted Business Mailers should include a powerful message and as many methods to respond as possible with the call to action.
A good letter will outdo the most impressive brochure. It is the sales pitch and so it must command attention with relevance and engaging paragraphs. It must stimulate interest to the point of action. The simplest and least expensive B2B Mailer has three elements, which would be a form letter with a reply card in a simple plain outer envelope.
The Postal letters "the Direct mailing" can be typed on business stationary and offset at the local quick-print shop. The printer can typeset the reply card even though it is not mandatory that you use a response type format here you can pay the postage for every card returned to you by setting up an account with your carrier or if you don't want to bother with this you can let the recipient put their own postage on the card.
The outer envelopes are important. Although they offer a weaker message, Postcards have benefits over mailers because a stand out message is seen by everyone who handles the mailer, however, a well spent 1 to 3 cents spent on a better quality envelope has been known to increase response by over a point, well over in some of our tests. The envelope can still be a number ten business envelope but mind your quality. THink about it, you are doing a mailer of 10,000 records and decide to spend 2 cents more on the envelope totaling $200, the response goes up by 1.3 points so you end up with 130 additional leads generated for only $200.00. Personally I cannot see why this is not the best deal of the century because it pays off and you can use the profits to upgrade the campaign, maybe adding more personalization to the letter, an additional brochure or other inserts or graphics on the outer envelope.
Keep in mind that Turn Key Business Mailers can look like a regular letter, use a typewriter and copy it on your regular letterhead, make it friendly with a conversational tone using personal pronouns such as "I". Be specific explain what you can supply to the Business Address, if you need to elaborate on a principle, theory or technical point consider using a brochure for that type of information. It is the letters job to "sell" not to "tell".
Sending out free gifts, useful data cards, or even paper weights that will stay on an executives desk for branding your corporate image via Direct Mailers works well for Lead Generation, but what we are after here is Branding which means we need to associate your company image with your services in the executives mind so that when he or she has that need, you are already engrained in the habit factor so the decision to call is a "no brainer".
Business Direct Mailers - Getting Attention While You Work