No, Snail Mail Isn't Dead.... Far From It

Let's talk about the power of direct mail and how you should be using it to market your business. We can’t tell you how many conversations we have with people who dismiss direct mail marketing as ‘outdated snail mail’. Such is the modern world, people seem to think that emailing is a direct substitute for mailing. Either that, or they try to tell us that direct mail is too expensive to use as a marketing stream. Unfortunately, there are many areas of marketing that business owners lazily dismiss as ‘dead’, including direct mail, TV, and newspapers. This could not be further from the truth. However, with most people sleeping on them as direct marketing methods, it opens the door for those who are in the know. Hopefully, after this chapter, you will be one of those people.?

There are a lot of different media choices out there and some, while not dead, have become more challenging over the years. For example, TV infomercials, which were thriving in the 1990s and 2000s, have become more challenging in modern times. However, direct mail is as strong as it has ever been. In fact, not only is direct mail thriving, but it is actually easier to do than ever, in some ways. There is much less competition than there used to be due to the emergence of so many other media forms like TV, radio, online, etc. Many businesses have abandoned direct mail in pursuit of more ‘modern’ techniques, leaving a window of opportunity behind. So, now that most of your competitors have abandoned direct mail, you need to find a way to effectively use it. Of course, as with anything, if you use it wrong, it does not work. And the unfortunate truth with direct mail is that most people do it wrong.?

The top priority for direct mail, which dictates whether it is going to work or not, is who you mail it to. This may seem obvious, but many people fall at the first hurdle. We see lots of businesses draw a radius around their office and deliver direct mail to every door in that area, as if that is an important criterium. This form of marketing is nothing more than a glorified lucky dip. The first people you should always add to your direct mail list is existing clients. Yes, you already have them on the books, but direct mail nurtures that relationship, builds respect, and keeps them informed. After all, when you get a client, you want to keep a client. Direct mail to existing clients can consist of a number of things. Inviting them to a client appreciation event, sending them five tickets for their friends, mailing them the latest book you have come out with to pass along to their friends, sending them a special report on the new tax plan, and so on.

Next on your list should be your prospects and people who have shown interest. Maybe they made an appointment to meet you, and they didn't make it to the appointment. Maybe they met you and didn't move forward with you. These should be prospects at every stage, prospects who maybe have been in your database for six months and you are still nurturing them and developing them. Prospects who maybe just opted in on the website or via a Facebook ad. Prospects who showed interest at an event. For whatever reason, these are the next people to target with direct mail. Based on the qualification information you ask for, your prospects are worth spending money on. Generally, you should not discriminate when it comes to prospects – but you can filter people out depending on assets under management, income, age etc. You should have asked your prospects all kinds of information during initial contact, so you should have enough data on them to know whether they are a prospect or a dead end.?

There are different ways you can determine whether or not a prospect might be perfect for you and how much you should spend on them. For example, if you know a prospect lives in a neighbourhood where the houses cost $10 million on average, then they may be worth spending a bit more money on. You can definitely come up with a strategy that sends different amounts of direct mail to different groups of prospects. The more information you have on them, the better positioned you will be to make those kinds of calls. The most common origin story for a prospect is the classic opt-in page, at which point you should be asking them how much in assets need to be managed, how old they are, what their time horizon to retire is, etc. These questions are designed to show what their value to you is going to be.?

We also have an order in which we target prospects, like a kind of tier list, if you will. We find that going by recency as a general rule works best. For example, the prospects you have just made contact with should be targeted first. Then you can move on to the prospects you have been nurturing for a while, if you still see them as a good prospect, and so on. Obviously, there are clear exceptions when it comes to people you think are worth a lot of money to you, but the recency rule is a good general plan to follow.?

The third group of people to target with direct mail would be cold leads or cold prospects. This can be a great source of new business if used correctly. For example, we recently worked with a big company and all of their marketing material resources came in the form of Data Axle, which used to be called SalesGenie. These resources are great for creating lists of cold leads and cold prospects. Essentially, you can go through and pull every dentist in Denver, Colorado. You can go through and pull every chiropractor in New York. You can go through and pull every car repair shop in Las Vegas, or whatever it might be. So, if are looking to target a niche and find cold contacts, this is a great start because you can get a pretty lengthy list of businesses, names, and information.?

However, there are two types of lists you should be creating for this kind of marketing. One is your compiled list, which is something you would get from Data Axle as we described above. These resources are going to give you all the listings or any type of business that falls within your criteria or they will give you consumer listings based upon the value of their house, their income level, whether they have kids, how old they are, etc. With these compiled lists, even once you have them, you need to figure out what you’re going to do with them. Although spam is legal, you are going to get blocked by the ISPs pretty quickly and it is very unproductive for everyone involved. Of course, we do a lot of email advertising and we use things like Facebook and Google to retarget and avoid spam issues, but this chapter is about direct mail.?

There is also something we call a response list. Let’s say that you are looking to niche with direct mail. If your niche was dentists, for example, then you may look towards the dentistry trade magazines. You could go to the subscriber list for the top magazines and direct mail to a subset of their subscriber list. You could even display ads in the actual magazine and direct mail to people at the same time. That way they are getting the same message from two different media sources. So, much like the compiled lists, you can buy the names via the magazine or an associated service, then you can direct mail to those names. This way, you know exactly what kind of people you are marketing towards. We often call these people suspects as they have not raised their hands to be deemed prospects, but they are the kind of people we want to market towards. They don't know you, they haven't done anything to respond to you, but you are going to market to them because they meet your target niche or your avatar client that you want to work with.

So those are your three target areas, current clients, prospects, and suspects… in that order. Frankly, in many cases, simply adding direct mail and better follow up systems can dramatically improve marketing results. Even without going after the broader cold lists, most companies can do a much better job with their prospects. Remember, prospects have already raised their hand to show some form of interest. They know who you are, and they have opted in. If you go after the prospects more aggressively and separate out the ones who are ready to make an appointment today versus the ones who didn't take the option, you might find an awful lot of minnows but also a few whales. The whales are always worth spending a lot of money on because of the lifetime value of them, and the initial value is going to be very high. Even if you have to sift through a bunch of minnows to find a whale, the overall cost versus money earned is going to be very positive.?

Once you find someone who you think could be of value to you, don’t let email do the work. That’s how you lose a big fish. The average person gets 211 emails per day. If you are relying on a big fish seeing your email amongst 211, then you are basing your business marketing on luck. Deliverability rates are also only at around 20%, meaning a lot ends up getting caught by the spam filter. Google actually has two spam filters. They have the spam folder and then they have the commercial email folder - two different places that most people are not going to look if they are using Gmail. AOL and Yahoo can be even worse. So if you don’t use emails correctly, you could easily end up either in a folder no one will ever look at, or lost among the 211. This is not to put you off email marketing at all. It can be a fantastic tool when used correctly and we will teach you how to do that in another chapter. However, it should never be relied upon as your only source of marketing and direct mail definitely offers a lot of extra incentives. As long as you get the address right, direct mail is 100% going to be delivered to the person you want it to be delivered to, after all. If you do direct mail right, the response rate can be very high, especially when you add extra stuff onto it like emails, text messages, remarketing, retargeting, etc.?

Coming back to the number one complaint about direct mail marketing, the price. If you have a list of 200 current clients, it really doesn’t cost much to send them direct mail, whatever that may be. Also, thinking about the cost of direct mail without taking into account the pros is just na?ve. If your direct mail convinces just one client to stay with you, or perhaps hand you even more business, then it has already paid for itself ten times over. Then, if you have 1000 prospects and just a few of them become clients from your direct mail, that has again turned over a huge profit for you. Don’t just look at the cost of direct mail, but also how much it could bring in. As the old saying goes, you have to spend money to make money. We also automate our entire direct mail process, so it’s not like you have to spend the time physically putting stamps on every letter. Once you have the whole process streamlined and automated, it really doesn’t cost as much as you might think.?

Remember we said that the average person gets 211 emails every single day. Well, the average person also gets four pieces of direct mail per day. What would you rather compete with, 211 emails where you keep getting pushed further down the list and could even end up in a spam folder, or three other pieces of direct mail? Very few people come back and look at an email from yesterday, much less three days ago. However, once you open a physical piece of mail, you are far more likely to come back to it later because it’s right there in front of you. People have to go through their mail. They have no choice. There could be bills in there or letters from grandma. What this gives you is a captive audience as a direct mail marketer.?

This brings us onto one of the greatest copywriters of all time, Gary Halbert. He masterminded the direct mail marketing where you would get a letter all about your last name. "We've researched the family history of the Moodys, and we found your family crest.” Then they would advertise mugs, t-shirts and all that good stuff with the family crest adorned. Those of a certain age will certainly know what we’re talking about. It was really unique and really compelling direct mail marketing. This is one of the most mailed letters in history and the concept was born over A-pile, B-pile mail. Most people sort their mail over a trash can. The useless stuff gets dropped and the interesting or necessary stuff gets put on the kitchen table or wherever. The perfect example of A-pile was a letter from grandma. So, he made sure his letters looked hand-written with a live postage stamp, rather than a printed return business label. He wanted it to feel personal and individualized to ensure it didn’t drop into the trash can.?

We are even seeing people use postcards these days. While these are not obviously Pile A or Pile B, because you don’t have to open them to see what they’re about, they do give companies a chance to present a compelling sales message on both sides. As long as you have a compelling headline, a compelling photograph, and a compelling offer, they can work well. With a postcard, the main pro is that they see your message straight away. However, you have to make sure that your postcard is so compelling that it instantly draws the person in, otherwise it will also be dropped straight into the trash. That involves knowing what they like and what they are looking for. Someone who has never played golf in their life won’t do much with an offer of a free round. A vegetarian won’t do much with a free steak dinner offer.?

This kind of direct mail marketing is all about standing out. For example, lumpy mail or 3D mail can really grab the attention of the person receiving it. Imagine if you got an actual bank bag in the mail instead of an envelope. It’s weird but that makes it compelling and interesting. You’re going to open that envelope/bank bag every single time. There is loads of weird stuff you can do with direct mail marketing, and it costs a lot less than you think. We actually did one recently that included an Olympic gold medal in a bag. You can feel the shape and weight before you even open it, so there is no way you are going to throw it away. Try not to be too obvious or follow trends with this. For example, if we feel there is clearly a personalized pen in an envelope, we usually just open it, take the free pen, and throw the rest away. Gary Halbert was again a pioneer at this kind of stuff. He actually sent out direct mail marketing that included a letter and a dollar bill attached – a real dollar bill! That is sure to get the attention of someone opening it. If you were chasing a huge CEO, you might even feel bold and attach a $100 bill. That may seem like a big cost, but if you land that huge client, it is a drop in the ocean. What we are saying is get creative and don’t be afraid to invest in unique direct mail marketing, because it’s exactly that, an investment.?

When it comes to big prospects that we really want to get on board, we set up a long-term campaign. If they are super valuable, they qualify for this massive campaign. We might mail them Mrs. Fields cookies and popcorn and a big box of what we call a shock and awe package. After that, we will send a postcard a week for 12 weeks, and then what looks like a personalized letter. We never give up on these people either. As soon as you give up, you guarantee they won’t ever become a client. But as long as keep a line of communication open, there is always a chance. At the very least, you remain on the mind if they ever do start looking for someone in your niche. We have had people tell us in the past that we sent them stuff for seven years before they finally made a decision. One guy we eventually worked with had always dreamed of owning a penthouse in Miami and a Lamborghini. Don’t ask us why, but that was his personal dream. We noticed in a meeting once that he was hunched over a calculator, frustratingly looking at sums and numbers. When we asked what he was doing, he revealed he was calculating how much he could have earned by now if he’d signed up with us when we first contacted him. He would have had enough for the Lamborghini within a year.?

In most cases, you will have been drip-feeding direct mail marketing to someone for a decent period of time before they become a client. It’s all about knowing who the prospect is and catering your marketing to them. As we said before, if you want to land that big CEO then a hundred-dollar bill may make a statement. However, if someone opts in from Pakistan and only has 22 cents to their name, you wouldn’t use the same strategy. We have systems where the data source, like Data Axle, will do this for us now and we can go in and pull the data together, looking at what the profile of the person is. You can even Zillow their address and find out how much it is worth. It's kind of scary that we can know that much information about a person, but from a business point of view, we love it.

You have access to this information, and you want to take advantage of it so that you can do the best job you can. Using direct mail in these cases is critical for your success, and you can't ignore it. Knowing the client value that you have is critical. A lot of times we talk to advisors and this objection about direct mail being too expensive is simply a misunderstanding of their own business. If you're going to make $5,000 the first year and maybe $100,000 over a lifetime from a client, spending a few dollars, or even a thousand dollars on them is a no-brainer. If you spend a thousand dollars to get them, you have a 500% return the first year. And most advisors we work with would be jumping up and down and doing the hula hoop if they're getting their clients 10% or 11% annual return.

Anytime you are thinking about follow-up systems, or you are thinking about an effective way to communicate to an individual or to a group, we know that face-to-face is the best, but direct mail marketing is a great option. In many cases, you're not going to do face-to-face frequently enough with a client, or you're not going to be able to drive to somebody's home and knock on the door and say, "Hey, you visited our website." In our expert opinion, on the phone is the second-best option, but then you end up with text messaging and direct mail. For us, email is down the list, a long way below those two. Then you have retargeting, Google and Facebook, and automated voicemail. There may be some other ones that come up in the future, but you have to make sure you include all of these in your repertoire.