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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Business Marketing – Maximize Your Worth

Any business wants to keep and augment its market share, and the tactics it uses to achieve that are important. Most companies start out the same way – spotting a need and fulfilling that need by advertising to potential customers using any means necessary. Your first few meetings with customers probably were, or will be, face-to-face consultations that either developed into a regular appointment or solved a problem within the initial few meetings. As a business grows, though, an increasing amount of its custom starts to come from other businesses.

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.

Direct Mail Marketing – Getting It Right

Although it may seem that everything these days is done via email, there are still situations in which working to a physical mailbox can be an alternative – or even an additional – strategy to a virtual mailbox. A lot depends on your market, of course. If you have a bricks and mortar business and a local customer base, then the personal touch certainly has its merits. Reinforcing your status as a local business (and therefore a local employer and supplier) allows you a certain amount of goodwill with your customers, and can be beneficial.

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.

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.