Direct Mail Marketing

What 1 Single Factor Can Boost Response to Your Mailing
by 400% ?

Say for instance you are an accountant announcing to area businesses how you can help them take advantage of a new tax law to save them money. You broadcast your "grand" news via 1000 letters. Now you check your watch, sharpen your pencil and wait for the phone to explode due to call over load.

With a letter alone, you ( the savvy accountant employing sound marketing principles) will likely end up making appointment's with 1.8 % of those who received your mailing. So for 1000 pieces out 18 appointments come in. That could be very worth worthwhile especially in this case where an appointment equals a sale. If this same example involved you selling copy machines, then the number of sales you typically walk away with after 18 appointments would tell you how much good this marketing endeavor is doing for your bottom line.

Now back to our accounting scenario. If the letter went out with a pen in it (and you tested the package out at the post office 1st to make sure it fit through auto-sort slot and does not cost an exorbitant amount to mail) you could expect the number of appointments that you reap to jump from 18 to 27 for the same 1000 letters. You could have sent a postcard announcement alone, but of course that can't carry a pen and typically postcards are weeded out prior to arriving at a decision makers desk in cold business to business sales.

Now, you want to save businesses a bundle with this new tax opportunity. How can you max out your response to your letter so that you get 73 appointments from the same 1000 pieces ??

Send a bigger item?
Add a music chip as used in greeting cards?

They might work, but here the "heavy weight" package is not required. Send the letter plus a promotional products incentive (basically a promise of a gift) and statistically you can expect 73 people to respond and ask for the offered FREE gift and an appointment! 400% more appointments, from the same amount of time, work, stamps, paper and ink than a letter alone. If each sale were $100 (not big but its simple math) the results from a letter alone compared to a letter with a promotional product incentive would mean the difference between $1800 and $7300.

Denny Gorman, a consultant to the Promotional Products Industry, published these results because the experience is credible, but still astounding. The statistics do not cover results of a 3D mailable that would increase open and read rates (the rate at which your letter is not left unopened and thrown away) plus an incentive, but a big factor to realize is that an incentive costs no extra to mail.

The 3rd Edition of Dan Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter records a real life example. An exhibitor for a trade show sent out an invitation to visit their booth (and included a large, themed 3D item) along with an incentive for a promotional product to be presented upon visiting the booth. Counting visitors at a booth would compare to counting appointments to determine positive responses. The increase in traffic over previous years was 75%. Hopefully, they matched the incentive to prospect so that their booth resembled profitable business appointments and not a fire sale. I think it's fair to assume they did or they would not be held as an example.

We have built our business on networking with promotional product give aways and doing trade shows with graduated size gifts (ie. walk- by freebie, and a larger gift if you schedule an appointment while you are at the show). Last year our company growth was 75% so we know the idea works. We are really grabbing onto this particular avenue of mailing with incentive though because clearly we can reach alot more business people that way. Another serious advantage: this is a very unpushy manner of sales. Businesses or individuals basically announce themselves as being interested, and all we are doing is offering a nice free gift.

Finally, if you are reading this article because you saw it in a letter from Solid Rock Promotions then you are living proof of the effectiveness of lumpy mail and possibly incentives. Did you open the lumpy envelope to see what was in it? Most people do, if you have a whole pile of mail why not open one with a present? The "lump" wasn't a rock or a chipped marble, but something useful so you thought at least somewhat favorably of the sender (us! Thanks) .