Email for Marketing Example.

Everywhere you look, people are all running loads of digital ads whether a company is large or in the start-up phase. It is clearly the popular thing to do in order to acquire customers these days.

I agree that digital marketing is a must, BUT there is HUGE opportunity in direct mail depending on what market you are in. This is especially true if you own a service-based business.

According to Go Inspire Group, direct mail campaigns generate five times more purchases than email campaigns. THATS CRAZY. It makes you wonder why that is the case?

I would argue that is comes down to laziness. It’s much harder to set up a direct mail campaign (especially one that is effective). However, wouldn’t you invest the time to set up a mailer if you could get 5x the results?

That answer for me was a clear YES. I like making more money, don’t you?

Let me share the exact steps I took to set up our mailer campaign, it could be worth thousands of dollars to you. It was to us.

Step #1: You need to target your ideal customer’s zip code(s). For my business, we market to higher income earners that have plenty of disposable income. There are SEVERAL zip codes in our area that would fit the mold for an ideal mailing. To start, we just picked one. It had 4,200 addresses in within the zip code.

Step #2: Figure out how to make your customers open these mailings. Once you figure out WHO needs to get these mailings, you now need to get them to OPEN the mailer. I know this sounds simple and ridiculous to mention, but there is a reason almost no “junk” mail gets opened these days.

So how do you get them to open the mailer? We have found this to be the most effective way to get people to open up your offer. This is clearly due to the curiosity that these create for the mail recipient. For example, It’s not likely you would throw away a bubble mailer if you feel some kind of item is inside of it. It makes you want to open it and find out what it is! For our offer, we chose to use a physical pair of dice to put inside the mailer.

Step #3: Once the mailer is sent, you need to GRAB their attention Immediately. You spent the money to get the mail to them and now their eyeballs are on your letter. How do you get them to read it?

You need to make sure that your Headline is HUGE and in bold and “pops”. It needs to be totally relevant to the item you chose to send to your customer. As I mentioned before, we chose the pair of dice.

Why the dice? Last year, we had one of the worst winters on record in terms of unexpected snow fall. It drove sales in our industry through the roof. There were hundreds of thousands of people that probably has wished they had had firewood during that time.

So our messaging around this is very clear to all our new customers we are trying to acquire:

Remember, the headline is the attention-getter and is going to be relevant to the item in the mailer. Now that you have their attention and they are engaged, you can now present your offer. Make sure to make it compelling!

IMPORTANT – If you are a seasonal business, all of this needs to be timed perfectly when you are on your customers mind. Since we do commercial and residential firewood, a mailing during the first cold snap or right before, is ideal for us. Make sure you take that into consideration for your product/market.

Step #4: Present the Offer with Urgency & Make it a No-Brainer.

Below is our offer to our customers from that same mailer. With this offer, we have the best price in the city, and we are offering additional incentives such as free delivery and stacking on top of it all.

Make sure to put a deadline in here for your customers to benefit from this offering or else they will either not act on it, or wait until its too late.

We want our customers to order ASAP. We know that we are going to be going like gang-busters starting in October, so we want to have them order now. This will hopefully do three things for us: Increase our cash-flow, take demand off of us during the height of the season, and finally get their order early so that we can benefit from word of mouth and referrals from these customers!

When presenting your offer, make it clear, concise, and right to the point. I like using bullet points so that the customer can quickly identify the offering.

Step #5: Make sure that you have tracking in place for the offer. If you are doing larger mailings, this can get very expensive. You need to make sure you are profitable from these mailings. Make sure to add a coupon code that your customer can enter at checkout so that you know how many took advantage of your offer.

For us, we took the zip codes name, and then added the dollar amount off to make the coupon code, so we know exactly how that zip code performs.

Here is the example – “Steiner25”.

Final note on this: By putting the name of the community as the code, it gives the customer a feeling of personalization, and it will be easier for them to remember. When it comes to word of mouth, this will also help spread the word to others and lead to a more accurate account of how well the campaign did since you can track it all.

Best of luck to you all out there. Please share with us if you were able to implement this in the comments section!