When I get home at night, I almost always head straight for the Mail Room where, usually, a few neighbors will be sorting their mail.

We direct marketers love watching people react to their mail pieces and we cringe thinking of all the work and money that goes into direct mail efforts that -Boom! get flipped into the wastebasket within seconds.

Every now and then, one of the neighbors will growl something like “What’s with this junk mail?” Ouch. Arrows through my heart. Bad targeting, maybe? Poor creative? Weak offer? I can’t look.

I console myself with the notion that it doesn’t matter if 50% of the people toss a mail piece in the wastebasket. Actually that’d be great. It’d be great if only 95% of recipients threw a direct mail package away as long as half the people who kept it responded. That’s a 2.5% response rate! Hallelujah.

Oddly enough, even though we talk a lot about response rate, it doesn’t really matter much. Dollars matter. For instance, a few years ago, we developed a mailing campaign for very expensive hospital equipment made by 3M. We mailed 10,000 pieces and got two sales. 3M made a bundle of money even though our response rate was minuscule.

When we’re working on a direct mail package, we tend to think in terms of the 40-40-20 Rule: 40% of the success of your program is due to the right Mailing list(s), 40% due to the direct mail Offer and 20% to the Creative. Our Creative Director insists that it should be the 100-100-100 Rule because all three are crucial and he’s right in a way but inferior creative design sent to the right lists will always out pull outstanding creative sent to the wrong mailing lists.

Here are some ideas to avoid the wastebasket syndrome.

If you want your direct mailing to get opened, begin with the envelope. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But look at all those #10 white envelopes in your own mailbox. Do any of them stand out? Get noticed is the first rule. Stand out. You might have to test a bit.

Arouse the curiosity of your prospects.When I worked at Better Homes and Gardens, we offered a series of books about Decorating. I knew showing a beautifully decorated room quickly would lift response. So, I took the brochure and scaled it down and used the money we saved to pay for a glamour photo of a den on the outer envelope. Response was almost 20% higher than a white envelope with just teaser copy.

You can ask a question on your envelope and then tease them into opening it for the answer.

• Are you doing the right things to ensure your child gets into the right college? See Inside.
• Worried about your healthcare and not always sure you’re covered? Open this envelope for some good answers.

That kind of copy works when you know the lists you’re using, and how your product (or service) will help your target market. It is also relevant to them.

We once did a mailing to Texas for Tourism Canada. It featured a 4-color photo of a live moose with, between its antlers, a headline that read “Got any of these in Texas?” Worked extremely well.

Test a live stamp!

There’s a phenomenon called willing suspension of disbelief. It means your prospects know it’s not a personal letter from a real human being but they’re willing to pretend it is, if you do it right.

You can really make that work on your envelope by using a live Standard (Bulk Mail) stamp. Sure it’s easier to use a postal indicia, but for many people that will immediately put you in the undesirable category (and heading toward the trash).

At first glance the live postal stamp looks important and maybe touched by a real human being, so find out how much the additional cost will be from your mailing service to affix them (and ask if there are different designs available).

We’ve also tested more than one stamp and that lifts response also. Have some fun doing that. If you can afford it, you might want to test a couple of live first class stamps. I’ve seen that really pay off for upscale products and services.

Sticking with the “human” quality to your mailing:

• Consider using a script font, because it stands out if it pertains to your product. If not, use a type font with serifs (easier to read).
• If you have a great offer, and you should, put it on the envelope. We sent an offer for the American Motorcyclists Association with “Free Decal Inside” and that worked best. Of course, it was an extra cool decal we pictured on the face of the envelope.
• Use headlines that are fun and engaging, like moose/Texas or even just “If you throw this envelope away, you’ll never know what you missed”.

And your ideas. Let us hear about envelopes you’ve done that “begged to be opened”. Maybe we’ll feature them here!

Contributor: Lois Geller Marketing Group

One of the most puzzling things in today’s direct mail is the letterless direct mail effort. There’s a brochure and an order form but no letter! It’s more than puzzling, it’s astonishing.

I can pretty well guarantee that if you test a mailing campaign with a letter and no brochure against a mailing campaign with a brochure and no letter, the letter will win hands down.

For one thing, people like letters.

They see and hear advertising all day long. A brochure is just more advertising. A letter is personal. At least the right kind of letter is personal. Committee-diddled letters in corporatese about the company are not personal.

The right kind of letter, even a business to business letter, should resemble the kind of letter my Grandma Selma wrote to me when I was quite young.

For starters, her letters were instantly recognizable thanks to the still lingering . scent of her Rosewater, her beautiful, even handwriting, and the great stamps on the envelope.

Those elements were Selma’s “Brand”.

She was a great writer, too. A journey to Atlantic City felt like a great adventure when she wrote about it.

Right off the bat, Grandma Selma accomplished two things: 1) she established a brand that built on itself and 2) her copy made for compelling reading.

 That’s what you want to do and you can thanks to brilliant mailing list selection, understanding your prospects and the magic of the digitally generated letter.

You also want to do something else. You want to create a positive response from your reader. Note the singular “reader”, not “readers”. Think of the person reading your letter as a person, the only person.

You have a heartbeat to grab her attention, then you have to hold it.

I’m often asked if a letter should stick to one page.

And, of course, you should always test. The difference between a great letter and a merely good letter can be a 500% boost in response.The answer is that a great direct mail letter is as long as it has to be. No longer and no shorter. We’ve written one page letters, even half page letters, that performed wonderfully well and 14-pagers that beat the pants off shorter letters in carefully planned tests. It depends on the product and the audience. A professional direct mail copywriter will know instinctively which is better.

I always begin my letters with an outline of what I want to say. Then I work on its different sections:

• The Opening that will grab the reader’s attention.
• The Salutation
• The Body Copy
• The Postscript

The Opening of the letter has to arouse interest. Years ago, it was known as the “Johnson Box” and often had a border around it. It preceded the Salutation, and could lure you into the letter, or start some excitement about the offer.

Once I wrote in that box, “Hundreds of truckloads of name brand luxury comforters are pulling up to Marshall’s loading docks this week”.

If you were excited about that prospect, you’d read on.

The Salutation can read: Dear John Smith. That’s fine, bland, but at least it’s personalized. It is even better if you know something about the person and make the salutation personal, which is quite different from personalized. So, if you know I came from an antique collector list, you can write: Dear Antique Lover, or, perhaps, Dear Friend, Do you ever watch the Antique Road Show?

The Body of the letter contains all the pertinent things your prospect needs to know about your product or service with benefits explained in a fascinating way, the exclusive and time-limited Offer, the guarantee to give them the assurance that they can buy from you in the mail or online, and various versions of “call to action” to urge response now.

A P.S. at the bottom of the letter is almost mandatory thanks, mostly, to an odd quirk of human nature that makes a lot of people look at the end of the letter first to see who signed it. The eye just naturally keeps going down to the P.S. where you will have summarized your main benefit point and offer succinctly. That will drive genuine prospects back to the top of the letter to read more.

1. Have the signature in blue, this can be generated by a mailing service that offers color digital printing, even though it might cost a bit more for the second color…it’s worth it. Looks like an actual human may have signed it.
2. Make the letter sound like a real person is writing it. We get so much direct mail that sounds like “corporate-ese” that we just toss it. But, a letter that’s written as you would write to a friend will always win.
3. Stories always bring people into the letter. When we wrote to U.S. fishermen to invite them to cast their lines in Ontario, we began and ended with anecdotes about landing big fighting fish. Irresistible.
4. Use crossheads every few paragraphs. They are mini- headlines that help the reader to look around and choose what he wants to read. Make them exciting.
5. Get the Prospects involved with you somehow. Publishers Clearing House is a Master at doing this. Take the red convertible from the paper inside and put it on the Order Form. Once people are playing with your letter, they’re already committed to you, so enclosing something is a good idea. Your letter can explain the whole process. You can also ask them a question,, or include a quiz with a few questions. It begins the relationship, and usually works well.
6. Be creative with the letter. We once did a program for American Express Auto Insurance. The client gave us ten or eleven letters they’d used, and they had all done miserably. We decided to take a look at a box they had of testimonial letters, and see if we could write one from a happy customer.

We called the customer and asked permission and she said if she agreed with the copy she’d let us do it. So we wrote it, sent it to her and it was about an accident she’d had and how quickly and easily American Express had taken care of all the stress. At the end we put a P.S. where she admitted we’d edited her copy, and we’d given her a small Tiffany chain to thank her for doing the reading and making the changes to her own True Story. It worked great.

So, think about your letter. It is the one to one relationship you’ll have with your prospect/customer. Do a great job with it, and you’ll have amazing results too.

P.S. Report back to KD Mailing & Fulfillment and let us know how it worked.

Contributor: Lois Geller Marketing Group

 New business leads cost most of us a fortune. We’re not talking about prospects in a directory or sending out advertisements via email or direct mail. Real marketing leads for new business are direct results of conversions from your marketing efforts and can cost up to $500 each.

Example:
An HVAC company runs a pay per click (PPC) campaign on the Internet. Two hundred Internet users see the ad on a search engine and click through to the company’s website at an average cost of $3.50 per click. Twenty of those Internet users actually contacted the company for an estimate. Cost per lead, $35 each. The same formula of dividing leads into the cost of the total campaign holds true, whether an advertiser uses the Internet, direct mail, newspapers, radio or television. Cost of the campaign, divided by new leads generated.

A new car dealer places ads in the local newspaper and an automotive classified website. Thousands of people see the ads, and the ad costs the dealership thousands of dollars. One hundred people come into the dealership to talk to a salesman and some even took a test drive. Eight people actually purchased vehicles. The total campaign cost was $6,000 and the customer acquisition cost was $750. What about the other 92 leads resulting from the dealerships marketing efforts?

So now do you get the idea? The cost of a new customer is much higher than the cost per marketing lead. However, the trick to reduce the cost of a lead may be even more difficult than reducing the customer acquisition cost. This holds true for both consumer leads and business-to-business sales leads.

Here are five tips to reduce the cost per sales lead for your next marketing campaign:

1. Market to your own customer list. These people know you, like you, and should be interested and open to what you’re offering. Also, you will not have to purchase this list.
2. Target your audience. One way to do this is to determine the demographics of your current customers and where they are located. For instance: age, income gender and marital status.
3. Create a great offer. No matter whom you market to or how you phrase the offer, if the offer is weak, chances are your response rate will also be weak. The better the offer, the better the response. Thus, the cost per lead is reduced. Also, the offer should be well timed. For example, don’t try to market a snow blower in June.
4. Choosing the right marketing vehicle. There are several main vehicles to choose from for marketing a product or service. Direct mail, print, TV and radio, and of course the Internet. The Internet is huge; this includes PPC, social media, banner ads and website conversions. If you do not have a website, shame on you; have one developed. Any offer, promotion or sale should always be displayed and promoted on your company website. However, if you’re looking to drive new business and create new business leads you’ll need to do much more than just have a website. The goal should be to use your website to not only support your brand and your product or services, but to also feature and support your other marketing efforts.
5. Pick the right vendor. The right vendor could help make your marketing campaign successful. The right vendor not only has competitive prices, but also has the experience to guide you in the right direction. Before you choose a vendor, whether for direct mail or Internet marketing, visit their company website. After you make initial contact with a vendor, go to LinkedIn and check out the profile of the salesperson you’re dealing with. See if they have the experience and expertise you believe would benefit you and determine if you believe you could form a relationship to work closely with that individual.

Here are five tips to reduce your customer acquisition cost and how to increase customers:

1. Collect information from your prospects. Just because a new sales lead or prospect does not purchase any of your products or services today, does not mean they will not turn into a new customer tomorrow. Your chances are better converting them into a new customer if you’re able to contact them with other promotions and offers you have over time.
2. Following up with your leads is without question the very best way to reduce new customer cost. By the way, even if they don’t purchase products or services from you today, you can always add them to your marketing list for future marketing efforts.  This will also help defray the cost per lead for your next marketing campaign.
3. Keep in constant contact with your sales prospects. Following up is so important to reducing new customer cost, it should be mentioned in all five tips. The trick is how to follow up with a prospective new customer. This all depends on the information you have for that prospect. If you have full contact information, you can make a telephone call, you can send an email, or the very best way to follow up with a potential new customer is to send a personalized direct mail letter. Don’t send a generic letter in a window envelope. Instead send a personalized business letter in a closed face envelope. If the communication feels like a real business correspondence, the potential customer usually cannot resist opening it. Making a telephone call to your prospect might work if you have already formed some type of a relationship with that individual, whether it’s a consumer or business-to-business sales lead. But be careful, most of us do not like getting sales calls and you could do more damage than good if you call too often. Email is free and it works sometimes. But if your marketing efforts are successful and you get a lot of leads, you will need to resort to using email blasts. Email blasts are notorious for getting blocked by todays sophisticated spam filters. Therefore, those emails may or may not reach your target prospect, also emails are too easy to ignore and delete.
4. Create a follow-up system. The most difficult task for converting marketing leads into new customers is creating a good follow-up system. Following up with leads should be automated and allow you to contact prospects in a timely and meaningful manner. KD Mailing & Fulfillment provides our clients with an everyday direct mail solution that generates personalized mail merge leads and sales letters the day after a customer or prospect lead is generated. We can also create and provide email blasts with your message.
5. Remarket to your lead and prospect list. Once you have made a connection with a potential customer or prospect, you should treat them as you would a customer. Every time you send a newsletter, they should be on the newsletter list. If you have an announcement, they should receive it. Any promotion you provide for your customer list you should also provide for those names that you have collected that are considered leads.