In an effort to differentiate our company from all the other direct mail fulfillment bureau's out there, we spent some time studying our competition and found something that nearly all of them seem to be missing... Specialization! We immediately started searching the direct marketing industry to find consultants that have backgrounds within our specialty industries such as the mortgage or the automotive industry (see list to the left), after all, no one understands the lead generation needs of an industry better than someone that was successful using leads within that industry.
Some of the services offered here set you up to choose our copywriting services to easily surpass industry standard response rates with designers that recognize the need to stand out, but by far our consultants will be your biggest asset. They understand that qualified lead generation is key to your success as well as the fact that that reliability is just as important as response rates.
The Direct Mail Triangle
It must have been marketing 101 that told us a good direct mail campaign greatly depends upon three factors, Your offer, Your Audience, and Your Mailer. What is not often done is to break down the three categories so let's spend a bit of time talking about the importance of these factors:
Your Creative Mailer:
Standing out among all the worlds direct mail can add anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars to each mailer. The cost is more often than not relative to the product and the audience that will be expected to respond, if you sell a service or product that will have a price tag of $50,000.00 you may want to consider doing more to stand out from the crowd, not because rich people read fancy mail, but because for a product with a higher than average price your consultant will more than likely target the audience with a specialty mailing list and at times the data available within a certain niche can be limited. With a limited database you will want to test small and make the absolute best impression to get the highest response before using up your audience and being forced to find alternative databases to work with.
If your product is useful and people have a want or need for it, you can typically add a couple pennies for a specialized envelope and some paper with a good feel to it and reap almost double the response than a plain old number 10 would get you. Once again, this will be gone over once you start working with your consultant.
About Your Marketing Offer
To be effective in direct mail you obviously need to catch the prospects attention with an "offer they cant refuse" this might be by using certain word phrases that are designed to catch their eye, of course the word FREE does that well but we have other tricks up our sleeves that just might not be as costly as the F word. There are way of making the slightest of discounts or giveaways look huge to your prospects, all this will come out when you start working with your consultant but until then, spend some time working up an offer that is affordable and will not put your company at a loss.
Your Targeted Audience
But wait, There's More than three?
Surprisingly, a lot of companies get the offer, the creative, and the audience done perfectly, in our opinion there is a FOURTH aspect to this triangle that is widely ignored and this is your SALES PITCH after the prospects become respondents, you can get an 8 percent response but you have got to have a good answer to their call. Well trained sales people who can hold a conversation as well as make a 1 minute friends will certainly increase sales so spend some time training and re-training the first sales force which is in fact, the face of your company that will form the very important first impression that any will respondent will see.
