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.

"Successful Direct Marketing Methods"

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 Rule of Thumb

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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By using the Facebook Mailing List Builder, it is possible for you to unlock the potential of the Internet’s most popular social networking site, start really building your list and increase your customer base by a factor that will drive it from average to awesome. It’s all there for you to do, and this guide explains exactly how. Why would you need to go spending upwards of $50 on pre-compiled mailing lists which may have no relevance to you at all when you can compile your own and get it right?

Facebook Mailing List Builder

This is an innovation that will burst your direct marketing potential wide open, making it possible for you to start really using the Internet to your benefit – and freeing up time for you to find out what else you can do on Facebook. Maybe it’s not so bad an idea to check up on what your old friends are doing – especially as you’ll soon be making a lot more money than they are!

Email Subject Lines Report

This is why this 17-page downloadable PDF report is such a clever idea. You know how it is when you’re scrolling through your email and there’s about 75 of them there. If something doesn’t look important or entertaining, the chances are it will end up deleted before very long. So to get right into the crux of the matter right there in the subject line is something that will make a huge difference, and with these bulletproof subject lines to hand you can make that happen.

Grabbing the attention and the confidence of your customer before they have even read your email creates a powerful knock-on effect which gives your every word more weight. This provides you with an excellent chance to drive the sale, and makes this guide a must-have. It’s one of those little difference-makers that comes around every once in a while and can change the way you do business for good. It’s certainly worth checking it out.

Why not try it for yourself?

99 Good Email Subject Lines

Take for example the fact that Bypass Publisher allows you to place your messages directly into the RSS feeds of your customers. This technology means an end to the intensely frustrating process of readying a message to be sent and then watching as message after message bounces back because the customer has changed their email address or their email service is currently down. The advantage of being able to leave this in the hands of an intuitive program cannot be overestimated for any business.

It has all of the advantages of direct emailing and blogging without the annoying negative aspects of both. With this technology you get your messages right in front of your customers, without needing to plead with them to visit your blog, or bank on the chance that they will open all of their email or, worse yet, worry that they won’t see the message because it has been chewed up by their spam filter – unreliable technology at the best of times, as you can find out from speaking to anyone who has lost an email from a friend because it was incorrectly intercepted.

Why not see for yourself?

Bypass Publisher!

It is this personal touch that is at the heart of any business improvement strategy. You will build an email list that can be used to keep in contact with the customers that you pick up over time. How you then address those customers is vitally important. Talking to the customers on their level is essential. There is always a danger inherent in constantly talking – or writing – as though there is a very firm dividing line between you, the business and them, the customer. If someone feels that they are simply being sold to, that they are a unit to be treated as a reliable cash machine, they will not even read your email.

Writing an email to a customer presents a lot of challenges. There is a question as to how much you acknowledge that you are a salesperson and the person receiving it is a customer. It is natural to want to be the customer’s friend. To an extent, it is possible to keep this up but you still need to keep the sale at the core of your message. It is not about how much of a salesperson you are, or how much of a friend. Rather it is about keeping a natural voice. You are writing to a customer, but it is a customer that you like. The customer can be happy to hear from you, and ready to make a purchase too.

It is not just about how you use your email list, but also when you do. Too many emails will lead to a customer becoming frustrated and irritated, and therefore less likely to remain a customer. There is a balance to be struck between keeping yourself in the customer’s mind and “spamming”. The golden rule is to have a good reason for sending a message to your email list. The best way to do this, in fact, is to have some “email only” offers that are available only to people on your email list. You can have better offers for your mailing list because they are a select bunch, and it will make them more likely to read your email.

The core message to keep in mind when using an email list for direct marketing is that people need a reason to act. Even if that action is something as simple as opening and replying to an email, you as a business individual need to make it more likely that your customers will become, and continue to be, return customers.

How often you update your mailing list is really up to you, however considering the importance of regularity, it is worth scheduling it. It all depends on your turnover of customers and the frequency with which you want to send out marketing emails. Once a week is not a bad idea – it can be the last thing you do in a business week, or the first thing you do at the start of a new one. This aspect of regularity makes the updating of the mailing list a routine, and gives you the impetus you will need to keep it current. The longer it is current, the more valuable it is.

Updating a mailing list is not simply a matter of adding the new customers, of course. If, for example, it is an email list, you will find that there are email addresses that bounce back any mail sent to them. Now, this is not to say that you should immediately delete from your mailing list any email addresses that bounce back an email. In actual fact, there are a lot of reasons why an email might bounce back. It is not a sure sign that mail from your address has been blocked, or that the email address is no longer functioning. It could be bouncing back for another reason, so do not delete the address from your contacts immediately.

If you receive contact from a customer, or potential customer, who makes very clear that they are not willing to receive any more contact from you then it is time to delete their details from your mailing list. There is nothing to be gained by continually contacting people who have made it clear that they do not wish to hear from you. All that will happen is that you will harden their opposition to you.

A mailing list is only as good as it is up to date. The up-to-date mailing list will ensure that the right people are receiving your email – or their paper mail – and are getting back to you in order to make purchases or retain your services. Ensuring that you are contacting the right people, though challenging, will ensure that you have an ongoing strategy for customer retention which will keep your business ticking over. A constantly updated mailing list is a vital part of a company’s marketing strategy and is worth all the time that you put into it.

Whether your work is chiefly consultative or supply-based, business to business marketing is something that you should think about early on in the life of your business. There are various reasons for this. Companies outsource a lot of work so that they can concentrate on applying themselves to their area of expertise. They want to get someone – for a reasonable price – who will have the same level of expertise in a different area. Also, companies have by their nature larger budgets than individuals, can write off consultative work as tax-deductible and are larger entities (therefore having more needs).

Business to business marketing is also more conducive to direct mailing by its nature. A personal email address is, for many people, where they receive updates from their family and friends, or what they use to keep track of blogs or forum memberships. Receiving business emails to those addresses can be somewhat jarring, and sending to them can put in place some tricky questions about how “businesslike” you can be in your approach. Working between businesses can be liberating in this respect, as it is all the more clear that you are in a financial transaction, a quid pro quo.

Business marketing is also free from the ethical question of “cold marketing”. There can be few of us who have not hung up on a telemarketer once or twice, particularly when they call us at home. Our home address is where we live, eat and are ourselves. In the office, it is right to talk about business. Getting a phone call trying to sell you anti-virus software at 7:30 pm is another thing entirely. So it is with email and direct mail through the postal service. A lot of people feel put out by receiving marketing copy with their daily postal delivery – but if they are a business it is part of the process and less of a problem.

Whatever else you do in terms of business marketing, this does make the entire process a lot more straightforward. You can be more direct, and can be more honest about the fact that you are selling something. This is a weight off any direct marketer’s mind. If you stop and talk to someone who works as a telemarketer it is not rare to hear them say that, as this is the only job they can get, they have to simply grin and bear it when a customer is rude to them. In direct business marketing this is much less of a hazard, and this clarity is extremely welcome for any business.

The core principle of direct mail is that it should cut out the middleman. In so many advertising and marketing campaigns much of the money involved goes to an advertising agency who create the marketing material and often identify where it should be placed. Direct mail is designed to go from the seller to the customer and encourage the customer to spend money on the products and/or services of the seller. There is no agency involved to do this. The aim is that the marketer, or the seller, will reach out to customers without having to spend an undue amount of money and will therefore get a return on their investment.

One of the obvious drawbacks of old-fashioned direct mail – prior to the advent of the Internet, specifically – was that even once you had got to your customer they had to decide to come back to you, and in order to encourage such a physical reaction from a potential customer there needed to be more time devoted to persuasion. Even if the first mailshot got a lot of people’s attention, it may have taken a while longer to get them to commit to returning to you with a view to making a purchase.

The Internet has made for a boost to direct mail campaigns, as the marketer now has the added option of email. If you have a marketing campaign planned and want to get it in the eyeline of the potential customer, it is much easier to do this by sending them an email. Assuming you can persuade them to take notice of the email you can include a link in the body text, which need only be clicked to take the customer to a sales page. From there they can spend their money.

It is not that we are lazy as a species – although some of us are, certainly. The reason that this more instant, more virtual form of direct mail has been such a godsend for marketers is simply that it provides less opportunity for the customer to be distracted or for them to fulfil their need somewhere else. It allows the salesperson to get more quickly to a point where they can close the sale and ring it up. This leaves more time to hone everything else, and is a major reason why direct mail is now more popular than ever.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle of it all, it should not surprise you to learn. What any marketer wants more than anything – short of a guaranteed sale, which is rarely offered for sale and usually has to be created by the business itself – is a qualified lead, and there is a great deal of difference between a cold lead and one which is already half-sold. It is not especially common to find lists of qualified leads for sale. It helps then to think of the Cold-Qualified-Sold question as a matter of scale, with an entirely unqualified lead at 0% and a sale at 100%.

Some companies will simply harvest email addresses, place the information on a CD-Rom and sell that data for a price. It is important to look beyond the promises and think about whether the information on the disc will actually be of genuine use to your business. It may be the case that the leads on the disc have been qualified to a certain extent, but they will only ever have been qualified on the product or service area in which you operate – not your business specifically, and the upshot of using this contact information can be mixed – with some people asking you to stop sending them email and others flat out ignoring your messages.

The only way to guarantee a pre-sold customer – or at least a qualified lead for your company – is to set about compiling your own mailing lists. The best way of doing this is to offer the opportunity to sign up for further information, something which can be done in a few ways. If you ask straight out for someone to sign up to receive email, they probably won’t do it. If, however, you offer an email contact service whereby you answer questions and deal with customers one-to-one in the first instance, they are more likely to have an interest in email that you send them.

Be cautious about buying mailing lists from anyone. If you have a trusted business contact who has a list that he or she either has no further use for – because he or she is leaving the business – and they want to sell it to you, it is fair to be interested. If the information on offer to you comes to someone in the same sector as you, but in a different niche, then it may be of use. But generalized, cookie-cutter mailing lists are of no use to you.

Direct mail marketing, though, is only as beneficial as your strategy allows it to be. You yourself will know how you respond to unwelcome junk mail – and junk mail is exactly what your direct mail can look like to people unless you give them reason to believe that it is otherwise. There are plenty of old tricks direct marketers used to use, which stick out like a sore thumb and can be a turnoff to customers. Equally, there are some which still hit the right spot if done correctly.

A lot of direct mail marketing follows the old rule of getting the customer’s attention by giving them something for free. This is an important trick to get right. A free gift offer will only be as successful as the free gift is attractive. “This Item Free” always sounds good, as does “50% Off”. This rapidly sounds less good when it has “To All Customers Spending $50 or more” tacked on to the end of it. Don’t insult the customer’s attention by pretending to give them something for nothing. If you can, give them an offer that they want to follow up on.

Another aim of direct marketing is to provoke action. Your direct mail marketing strategy has not failed if you don’t immediately have customers spending money in your store. Sometimes playing a long game engages the customer more. Making your first mailout into a competition can work wonders, for example. If you use a little bit of originality, offer as a prize something that people are genuinely keen to have, and make people think about it, you have already created a connection in their mind which will cause them to think positively about your company.

One of the most frequent recommendations to people designing documents for direct mail marketing is “Use color!”. This recommendation is altogether too short and uninformative. Yes, using color is important, but has led to far too many people reinterpreting that phrase as “Go mad with Microsoft Paint/Powerpoint!” and producing frankly terrible advertising literature which is garish and does not encourage further reading. Excessive use of exclamation marks and the Comic Sans font are also no-nos in this category.

Keep your advertising copy short but informative, use bullet points and underlining for emphasis, and remind the potential customer where you can be found. Give them a range of contact options – a postal address, an email address and a telephone number as an ideal minimum – and make your message stand out. Don’t be afraid to sell yourself, but don’t take that as an invitation to act like a crazy person.