Wait, what... you sent a printed letter? And got business from it?

It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.”? ?

Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam?postal?mail was superseded by spam?email. ?

Ah, progress!? ?

Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for?your?business, and?your?outreach.? ?

Dialing up the numbers game ?

First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on?that?topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.)? ?

Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly.? ?

Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company.? ?

The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday.? ?

The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article.? ?

A matter of cost ?

Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago.? ?

And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed.? ?

You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever.? ?

And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet.? ?

No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out.? ?

Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working.? ?

Where have all the emails gone? ?

One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.)? ?

Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was—gasp—a?cover letter. ?

Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital.? ?

It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more.? ?

Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog.? ?

Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now.? ?

Need help with thorny issues like these??Contact us.?We’d be happy to help!?