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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Updating Your Mailing List

Building a strong mailing list is a vitally important element of direct marketing, and requires a marketer to have a very pro-active approach if it is to succeed. One of the key elements of building the best mailing list is to never treat it like a job that is done. The best results in direct marketing will come when you keep your mailing list constantly updated, adding new contacts to it on a regular basis. A long mailing list with a lot of customers is a great thing to have, but is not as important as the mailing list being up to date.

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.

Direct Mail: A History – Now And Then

Most of the principles of marketing have been with us for years and years, and in that time what has really changed is the methods. In their number and in their nature, marketing campaigns today are more varied than they ever have been. But they are still linked in to that same old end goal – making people want to buy a product or pay for a service by using persuasion techniques that convince them that that thing is likely to improve their life or give them something extra. Even direct mail, which has overtones of a very modern kind, is something that has been practised for many years.

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.

Should You Buy Mailing Lists?

There is an increasing market in business for contact information that could be useful to marketers. this is visible in the sale of mailing lists by various companies – some with good reputations and others which have a tinge of the disreputable about them. For the small business looking to reach out to a wider audience, the idea of having ready access to a brand new list of potential leads can sound like a gift from the Heavens. But is that the whole story, and are pre-collated mailing lists the business boost they are sold as?

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.

Reaching Out To Your Email List

Email marketing has changed the way many companies do business. If you have built up a list of email addresses which is ripe for marketing purposes, the last thing you want to do is let this opportunity to grow your business slip through your fingers. The eternal question for a lot of email marketers is this: “How do I avoid losing customers through over-enthusiastic marketing while not losing out on custom because I was too cautious?”. Being measured is the absolute key here. It is important to get the approach just right if you want to have the best results.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. How do you strike the right balance? It requires you to think about your reasons for sending an email to a mailing list. It requires an equal amount of thought to go to what you put into the email. You want people to read these messages, and knowing how you react to spam, you will be aware that that is no easy thing to ensure. Email marketing depends more than anything on being a skilled communicator.

It will probably come as no shock to you that people tend to skim read, and if they haven’t got to the meat of the message within the first few lines they are likely to either delete the email or return to their inbox to read something else. They are unlikely to come back to the email you sent them if they feel that it was unimportant. Therefore it is important in all email marketing to hit the topic right away. It should be mentioned in the subject line – if they delete your email without even opening it then it might as well never have been sent – and you should get on topic right away, which means in the first line.

If you have a particular gift for writing in an entertaining way, then there is no need to shy away from doing so. If you can offer customers a deal and make them laugh in the same email then there is every reason to do so, but retain an aspect of relevance the whole way through. Don’t give them three paragraphs of gags and finish the mail with “Oh, and by the way, printer cartridges are no at 50% off until July 1st!”. They are more likely to close the email thinking “Funny guy!” than “Printer cartridges 50% off!”

Email marketing when done well can really boost your conversion rate and return on investment – an investment that it next to non-existent given the fact that email is free. But if you don’t make it work for you then you are better off not doing it at all. If you send out emails for no reason that the neutral observer could understand, you will find that you start getting bounceback messages from some addresses – and from there, it is a short leap to no-one reading at all. Email marketing is a powerful weapon, but it can backfire.

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.