Two Products That Will Improve Your Business

Trying to succeed with direct mailing and marketing but in desperate need of some sound, reliable advice? These two products will revolutionize the way you work, for the better…

1. Successful Direct Marketing Methods by Bob Stone

Everything has to be done for the first time at some time – and this is why we all have to take a few leaps of faith at one time or another. Of course, leaps of faith are easier to take if you have something on which to base that faith, and for the novice direct marketer it is helpful to have a guide. Bob Stone believes that he has compiled that guide, and a huge number of testimonials are in agreement – not to mention the fact that Successful Direct Marketing Methods is now in its seventh edition.

Direct Marketing is a competitive field and, as is to be expected, where there is competition there are people who get it right and succeed. There are also people who get it wrong and flounder, and are often never heard from again. By providing a series of case studies, Successful Direct Marketing Methods allows you to avoid the pitfalls that lead to failure, and to grasp what it takes to be successful.

It is amazing how much easier something gets when you have it set out in front of you. Anything that is worth doing carries with it a natural element of risk, but when you can minimize that risk by following a path that is laid out for you it suddenly becomes a lot less scary and as a result your enthusiasm will increase. Once you have that enthusiasm to build on, you will be genuinely amazed by what’s possible.

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“Direct Marketing Rule of Thumb” by Nat. G. Bodian

There can’t be many of us who have not been put off doing something because it looked, from the outside, like a challenge with too many hurdles to overcome. For the novice direct marketer, things can often look like that, and it can be the downfall of many a promising marketer. When a situation that arises that seems like it will require a bit of cunning to overcome, feeling like a fish out of water can be a very unpleasant situation to find yourself in. That’s what makes this book a must-have.

Direct Marketing Rules of Thumb is written by someone who has been through the whole process time and again, and knows every situation innately. If you find yourself in one of those situations where you have a 50/50 choice between something that will damage you and something that will win the day – and you don’t know which is which – then this book will have the answer. You see, it is written by a direct marketing professional with more than forty years of experience, and there’s nothing he hasn’t seen.

This is the guide book, the road map, which will make what was previously a very unclear road seem a lot more manageable. It is one that you will keep on your shelf even after the early days are done and the teething troubles are over, because it is a ready reference guide for the novice direct marketer and the more experienced, yet still unsure, professional alike.

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Building Your Mailing List

Direct marketing is a development that has allowed numerous small businesses to increase their market share without having to go to the often excessive expense of a marketing campaign. By going straight to your customers, you can keep yourself in the eye of your market without having to worry about overstretching yourself financially. In order to do this, you have to build what could be considered a one-on-one relationship with customers – and the ways of doing this are becoming more tried and tested as time goes on.

The first necessity for anyone looking to build a customer relationship that will aid them in the long term is building direct mailing lists. In order to do this it is necessary to get contact information that allows you to go straight to your customer. How you do this is up to you, but a popular way of going about it is to include a section on your business website which allows customers – or potential customers – to sign up for email updates. People are naturally much more ready to give their email address than any other contact information. Although an email address is direct contact information, it is less personal than a telephone number or a home address.

An email contact form on your website is also a good way of getting the required contact information. As a marketer one of your most important tasks is to be receptive to customer requests – and very often, the requests will be for information. You can include a great deal of information on your website, but there is never enough space for all the information your customer may need to know. Some will have very specific requests, which can only be answered with a direct reply. As long as you give this, you have the customer’s confidence, and you can then use that to build a relationship.

Direct mailing lists are indispensable for smaller businesses who want to up their customer share. If you are in direct contact with customers you can inform them immediately of important developments – a special offer, a sale or anything similar – and increase the amount of return business that you get. Additionally, you will gain a reputation for being customer-centered. The value of this cannot be overestimated, as customers today want to know that the business they are dealing with has their interests in mind.

One thing that must be remembered, though, is that direct mailing lists are not an invitation to bombard customers with emails telling them about everything your company is doing, nor to send them “spam” which simply reminds them that you exist. When it comes to sending mass email, the key is always “less is more”. A lot of companies make the mistake of mailing their customers too frequently and all that will happen as a result is that the customer will begin to ignore the email. Do not consider your direct mailing lists to be a reason for sending an email for the sake of it – they are to be used occasionally and at the right time, for the good of your customer retention.

How Email Has Helped Businesses Evolve

The Internet has made a major difference to the way we do business in this day and age. People who never would have considered even starting a business a decade ago are now doing just that because of the increased opportunities the Internet has offered them. A major part of this change has been the way that email works for a business, and in particular the difference between using email for direct mailing and the old way – using the postal service.

Think for a moment about how you used to treat the mail when it arrived in the morning. Any letter that looked “important” would be opened and read, while anything that was obviously marketing content would be thrown in the trash, usually without even reading it. Considering the expense of using the postal service for marketing purposes – the cost of postage, producing the marketing material etc. – this was never really a worthwhile use of time and money, but companies still did it because anything that might create repeat business was considered to be something that had to be done.

With direct mailing having become much easier due to the advent of email, those problems are in the main no longer relevant. Where before you had to pay for the materials used, and often for the design of any marketing material, typing your marketing information into an email is free of charge. Sending it is free, too, and even if a stamp is cheap and you have a deal with a postal service it can really begin to add up when you are writing to a number of people. If, as a conservative estimate, you were to say that it cost $1 per address to write, produce and send marketing material, a single mailshot to a hundred potential customers would cost $100 – less any deal for bulk.

However, as any mathematician will tell you, one hundred times zero equals zero. Therefore direct mailing using the Internet is a much more cost-effective way of getting the message out there. Given that one of the key rules of business is to keep your return on investment high, any sale which results from a direct mailing campaign using email represents a profit. It might be argued that there will be a number of people who do not read their email unless it is from someone specific – but even if someone does that, it didn’t cost any money to send them the mail so it does not represent a financial loss.

Of course, this does not mean that direct mailing will necessarily pay off. There is no doubt that there is an art to doing it correctly, and this tends to separate the successful from the unsuccessful direct mailing campaign. You need to give those customers a reason to read and react without laying it on too thick. Incentivizing repeat customers is an important consideration. This may involve offering them money off for using a particular order code, or developing a reputation for having an entertaining marketing campaign. One way or the other, if you make it work for you direct mailing can be a real money-maker.

What Is Direct Marketing?

Although people may not be in the habit of referring to it by the name, direct marketing has been practised for a very long time. This is nothing out of the ordinary, of course – we are by nature an informal species and are in the habit of shortening words and phrases down and using slang to refer to things. Therefore it is really no surprise that a term like “direct marketing” is more of an industry-specific item of jargon than a phrase used commonly in everyday conversation.

For clarification, direct marketing is really any form of marketing that takes place without an intermediary such as a newspaper (which carries an advertisement in among the columns of text about the day’s news) or something similar. With direct marketing, you are going right to the customer without passing through anyone else. Much of the standard marketing of the day is done by going to the media outlet that will carry your advertisement and paying them for the privilege. Perhaps just as often, a business will go to a dedicated advertising agency and get them to find outlets willing to carry the advertisement. To see your advertising spend break even, you will need it to produce a lot of customers.

Direct marketing has removed this necessity – but in a way it has always existed. People have been going direct to their customers for a while. Anyone who has printed off a sheaf of flyers and stood in the street handing them out is going right to the customer. The limitations of this method are clear enough in themselves, though, especially to anyone who has walked down a street and seen just how many discarded flyers litter the pavement from time to time. Direct marketing has existed for longer than we sometimes imagine, what has changed is the method and the efficiency.

You can place flyers in the hands of five hundred people, but if they are five hundred complete strangers you can make no guarantees as to how interested they will be to receive them. Even if the flyer is telling them of something that will benefit them a great deal, the fact that it has been handed to them by someone they don’t know makes it all the more likely that it will end up with all the others on the pavement. Knowing your customer, and giving them a reason to be interested, is the key to effective direct marketing.

It is important to make sure that your marketing campaign is targeted as efficiently as possible. A well-conceived direct marketing campaign need not cost you a penny, but it will take some time out of your day and so you will want to see some return on it. Assuming, for example, that you are sending a group email to a range of potential or previous customers, it should not read like a typical advertisement. It is somewhat jarring to be “sold to” in the impersonal manner a lot of advertisements employ, when you are reading an email addressed to you – which despite what some people may say, is a personal medium. It is this balance that you will need to strike.