Postcards - Picture Perfect Promotion

There is a simple but almost mystical law which governs promotion and marketing and their relationship to the amount of business generated: business will come in to the degree that you get your message out, promote, let people know you are there, advertise, write to people, call people, e-mail people and generally communicate to existing or potential clients.

It isn’t a fact that registers easily and it almost takes faith to follow this dictum until you have seen it work over and over in all sorts of different businesses and organizations (as I have).

This law transcends market conditions, the activities of your competition, acts of terrorism, time of year, the alignment of Mars with Jupiter and all the million and one explanations we frequently fall back on when business is slow. All these conditions may be present but there is still a way to rise above them: just promote more heavily and frequently and business will start to pick up again. It never fails.

It’s almost a natural instinct when times get a little tight or business is slow to cut down on expenditure. You hear people talking about tightening their belts. Too often the first expenditure companies seek to cut is their marketing and advertising dollar, and that is a serious error, a guarantee of contraction. You have to step up the promotion, not cut back. The trick is to find ways to get the maximum results with the minimum expenditure, but never to cut back and promote less. That’s suicide. Here’s one way to increase promotion while keeping costs down.

You don’t have to open a postcard!

We have found more and more brokers are turning to high quality, four-color postcards as the best form of direct mail. It’s time to pass on the information for those who haven’t yet discovered this cost-effective way of getting the word out and the business in.

This is especially timely advice as the national anthrax scare &ndash whether you give credence to it or not &ndash has resulted in a certain caution when it comes to opening envelopes from unknown sources. One great advantage of the postcard is that it doesn’t have to be opened &ndash there is nothing hidden about it and nothing to be scared of.

Quite aside from the anthrax angle, the fact that a postcard doesn’t need to be opened has another advantage: it has a chance to get its message across before it is dropped into the garbage can as “junk mail.” An envelope can be tossed in the trash without even being opened, allowing the hard-hitting promotional material inside no chance at all to get its message across.

The chances are fairly high that if you have a brightly colored image on the front of your postcard it will attract enough attention to get an initial glance. If your headline is a good one and invites further interest, then your postcard will be read and you will have succeeded in delivering your message. If the reader is even vaguely interested in what you are trying to sell, you may well get a visit or a call.

Cost-effective!

Even though it is imperative to promote more than ever when the economy is sticky or business is slow, that doesn’t mean you can’t cut costs in the process.

Many brokers are convinced that a full-color postcard with the right message on it, mailed out to previous clients (for re-financing for example) or to prospective borrowers gets the most bang for the advertising buck of any form of promotion, even when they also advertise in print, on the radio and TV, sky-writing, you name it.

You can mail out a postcard up to 4 1/4 inches by 6 inches for between 17.5

Direct Mail - Don

Where to Start:

Most novice marketers have definite fixed ideas about direct mail that are way off base - most often in the area of what to spend and how much to do. You should determine what you are able to spend for your marketing budget, spend it, and determine the maximum number of leads that you can create. For instance, I’ve heard this statement quite often: “We aren’t that large of a company. How could we send out 2,000 postcards all at once? “Because “What if they all call?” &ndash seems like a valid concern, right?

Here is the reality behind it: Unfortunately they won’t all call. However, a good deal of them very well may and making sure that your traffic in is not more than you can handle is something to think about. Truthfully, there is no sure way to tell exactly how many people will call if you haven’t done this type of marketing before. Think of it this way. What would happen if they did all call? You may not be able to handle all of them, but you would handle as many as you possibly could, right?

In this scenario, you would have maximized your income for that time period providing you could close up all those callers! You can also explore the idea of expanding your operation to handle the number of leads that you can create.

What if you didn’t max out your promotion at the very start? You can afford to send out 4,000 pieces every two weeks but you think that you will simply get too many calls to be able to handle them all. You, instead, send out only 2,000 and the response is decent. However, you still have some down time where you are having to try to “manufacture” sales.

You saved $400 in marketing money but you had enough down time where you could have closed quite a few more sales than you did. The question now is “Which gives me more money in my pocket? Saving $400 on marketing or closing quite a few more sales and earning an extra couple of G’s potentially.” More than likely the answer is to spend as much as you possibly can on your marketing, right?

By spending all that you can afford on marketing when you start a program you maximize your income almost immediately.

Okay, Time to Track Results.

Hopefully you have more than one way that you try to recruit new customers. So how do you know which ones are working and which aren’t? Set up a system to track the results.

Let’s take for example a situation in which you decide to start a Postcard Marketing Campaign for your business. The first week you send out 3000 postcards. When they start hitting homes you get 30 calls. Did all of these leads come from the postcards? Probably not. Because the week before you got 8 calls and hadn’t sent out any postcards yet. So how can you tell who actually got a postcard?

The Answer: All you have to do is ask them. “So how did you hear about our company?” The hard part is making sure that any employee in your company who answers the phone and may talk to a new prospect remembers to ask the question every time. The fewer prospects who answer this question, the less accurate your information will be when making future marketing decisions.

Now let’s assume that you have been sending out postcards for a while and you have a good number of calls coming in. If you ask the question “So how did you hear about our company?” they may respond, “I got your postcard in the mail.” But, by now you have mailed postcards to 4 different lists, 3 times each. How do you tell which list and which mailing this customer was from?

The Answer: Put a marketing code on the postcards that will tell you which specific postcard they received and when it was mailed.

Give each list a name and work the date into your marketing code as well. And the only thing your representatives have to ask is “Would you mind reading me the marketing code above your address?” This code should give you all the info that you need to know and help you keep your Marketing Results Tracking as accurate as possible.

Try not to operate off of assumptions about “how to market” if you haven’t educated yourself. And make sure you collect all the data and make your future marketing decisions based on the facts.

Raise Your Income!

How often do you sit around and wonder how to make more money and get more people to buy more from your company? It’s one of the most basic problems every company faces.

The answer is astonishingly simple. Too simple maybe. But I’ve seen it work over and over again with our customers in every line of business you can imagine.

You have to promote. Your income is determined by how much marketing you do. There are many effective marketing methods and you shouldn’t do just one. Even those whose products are strictly sold on-line, you still need to utilize those other methods of promotion. Your income is definitely 100% affected by how much promotion you do.

So raising your income is simply a matter of keeping in touch with your existing customer base, reminding them you are there, offering them goods or services they might be interested in, in such a way that they

want to buy more and more often from you. And increasing the size of your customer base by finding and contacting potential customers and persuading them to buy your products or services and then adding them to your customer base and keeping in touch with them in the same way.

If you have a good service or product and you make sure you service your customers well, you cannot fail to raise your income.

How rapidly you raise your income depends on how rapidly you do these actions, how much you promote. Handling the quantity or volume of promotion is definitely the most obvious thing you can do on an immediate basis. Believe it or not, if you send out crappy, crappy promotion, your income will go up. You may not be happy with the Return on your Investment (ROI) for that marketing effort, but definitely it will raise your income. Once quantity is handled and you are sending out loads of promotion, you want to tweak it and raise the quality of your promotion. And here are some things you can do.

Use Offers to Improve Your Response.

One of the barriers to buying which you work hard to overcome is “no hurry.” Why buy it now when I can think about it for a few weeks, shop around a little and get back to you, maybe? Familiar with that “I’m

interested. I’ll get back to you.” Or the card you have designed and mailed out gets put in a drawer somewhere for possible follow up, maybe next year some time.

One way to deal with this is to reward those who buy now and penalize those who don’t. How? With some special offer and one that is attractive and one which has a time element attached to it. “Order your new

lawnmower now and we’ll give you a free edger. Offer good until the end of May.” (Or whatever, you get the idea). Obviously the offer must be financially feasible for you so you’ll have to do some number crunching before you make the offer.

You can tie these special offers in to some particular event or season (like jewelry for Valentine’s Day or flowers or chocolates or just about anything for Christmas) but you don’t have to.

Special Offers help you maximize on your direct mail marketing and keep your customers ordering from you when you want them to. It’s just one more way to be in control of your promotion.

You can control how much and how fast your company grows.

2 Step Marketing

Do it Right.

I receive postcards all the time. The other day I received a postcard trying to sell me a copy machine. It had tiny, tiny lettering slathered all over the front and a large portion of the back of the card.

It was extremely hard to read, so hard in fact that I threw it away.

Several days later I received a postcard with 32 words on it telling me that I could get complete information on unrestricted long distance telephone service for 5.5 cents a minute with no additional monthly fee by calling the 800 number on the card.

I did call. I got the information, had my questions answered and ordered my long distance service changed.

The company who offered me the long distance service was using a time tested 2 step selling process:

Step 1. Generate a lead - Get me to call their 800 number.

Step 2. Provide the requested information - Provided to me on the phone by one of their sales representatives, who was able to answer my questions and make me feel confident that I could save quite a bit of money on my long distance bill and that the service would be as good or better.

What’s So Good About 2 Steps?

It is much easier to create interest (a lead) than it is to get a person through an entire buying process (a sale).

You aren’t getting the prospect or existing customer to part with any money just yet.

You can use postcards to inexpensively promote to your target prospects and customers and generate leads (inquiries about your products and services) to then be followed up on and converted to sales.

This 2 step process also helps you to create a list of people who were interested enough in what you offered to contact you.

You can then recontact the one’s who you didn’t complete a sale with when they first inquired, preferably until they do buy from you.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to get the information you will need to recontact the people who responded to your postcard offering.

Repetitive follow-ups with the people who contacted you will result in increased sales. Make it a company policy to follow up with those people who contacted you about your products and services.

The Most Effective Use of Postcards:

The purpose of your postcard’s message is to generate a sufficient level of interest in the mind of your prospect to get him/her to contact you to ask you about your offer.

You are generating interest, not collecting their money (not yet anyway). That is what the 2 step marketing process is about. Generating interested prospects and customers who contact you for more information.

Your message needs 3 parts to be most effective:

1. A clear statement of the biggest benefit of your product or service (in the long distance example, it was cost savings).

2. A good reason for them to contact you NOW.

3. A simple, easy way for them to respond (an 800 number for example).

Your message should be short and to the point. Short messages on postcards produce more leads than long ones.

For example:

Call 800-555-1212 for Your Copy of Our Free Report:

What 99% of Business Owners Don’t Know and Will Never Find Out About Using Postcards to Explode Their Profits

Offer ends 5-5-01 (Print a date 3 weeks from your mailing date to create some urgency)

Lots of people will respond to find out what they might not know. Don’t forget, they responded, which is least some interest in the information you have created a curiosity about.

This method works and is sure to produce a large number of inquiries if sent to your proper market.

This 2 Step Marketing Process Works.

Use the tips you have read here to create your next postcard’s message and see what happens.

You will generate a bunch of leads from people who are truly interested in your products and services.

Marketing - Like a Game of Chess

Have you started thinking about your Valentines Day Promotion yet?

It may sound like a strange question on the day before Thanksgiving but it really isn’t. When scheduling your promotions it is like a game of chess. You should always be thinking at least 3 moves ahead.

In this case each “move” should be one month. Therefore you should have been

thinking about your Valentines, or February promotions as you fall asleep after your big Turkey dinner.

There are a few reasons why you need to have your promotions figured out that early.

Getting Promo Out Takes Time.

By having it all worked out months in advance you give yourself enough time for the logistics. Getting the concept down, getting artwork put together, printing, and mailing all have to be done and this can take several weeks from being an idea in your head to being a piece of promo in your customers hands. You are also going to want to have the piece in your customers’ hands at least 2 weeks before the sale or event.

Get the Message Out Multiple Times.

Getting your promo out early lets you drive your message home through repetition. Take Christmas for example. If you start mailing to your customers in the beginning of November, you will be able to cement your company name in their head because you will be able to mail to them multiple times before they have to make their Holiday purchases. On the other hand if you start mailing to them in late November or Early December you will not have the time to do multiple mailings. Getting one mailing out at that stage will still be much better than not sending anything at all, but nothing works better when promoting than multiple mailings with the same message to the same list.

Free Up Time for Running Your Business.

Most people who own a business do their own marketing. Thankfully marketing is one of the few things in a business that you can do far in advance. By scheduling your holiday promotions ahead of time you will make yourself available to wear all of the other hats that you do around your business.

Scheduling promotions can seem like a huge task, but some things are just worth the extra thought. It really isn’t that daunting. Once it is done, then you’ll have time to put your ideas and energy on other areas that need your attention so that you maximize your efforts toward expansion.

Check Mate!

There

All too often people look at marketing ROI in terms of response rate: in other words, “I sent out 10,000 pieces of direct mail and only got 39 responses which is terrible.” This is wrong think.

When it comes to marketing ROI, you have to realize that the term means Return On Investment and the return is measured in dollars (or your local currency). Let’s say you spend $2,000 to get out a bulk mailing of 5,000 pieces and you get 10 calls as a result. Doesn’t look like much. But of these 10 calls you close 6 and get immediate sales of $12,000. That’s marketing ROI! And that’s not even taking into account the future sales to those 6 new customers. It could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The same simple mathematics apply to any other marketing efforts: radio ads, press releases or articles in magazines, print ads, yellow pages, web site, etc.

Obviously you need to keep track of response from each marketing campaign you do so that you can weed out unsuccessful campaigns and strengthen successful ones.

Case in point:

Jeff Lee, CFO of a very successful consulting company, Measurable Solutions, has adopted a successful small business marketing strategy based on direct mail marketing. Key elements are mailing out a newspaper and full color postcards. The design is done in house and the printing and mailing is done by a specialized postcard printing company. In his own words…

“We get our best response from mailing out a newspaper and back it up with postcards. Depends on the postcards. Some postcards have pulled better than others.

“The professionalism of the postcards is something that is effective: it gets attention, it keeps the image that we want to keep, it creates the reach, it creates the response and keeps our leads in a very high range.

“We probably average around 7,500 post cards per week. Out of 7,500 post cards we’ll get in an average of 15-20 leads. Of the 15-20 leads at least a third of them come to our introductory seminar. So say 5 or 7 people show up and they pay $1,700 a piece. Off of that we close a further $30-40,000 for services.

“The money we have put into the postcards is like a drop in a bucket compared to what we get back. We know that the more promotion we send out, the more return we’re going to get. It always works.”

That is excellent marketing ROI. Measurable Solutions spend about $2,275 for 7,500 full color post cards. That includes printing, postage, mailing (including the mailing list). From that they get between $8,500 and $11,900 in immediate response for an introductory seminar and an additional $30-40,000 follow-up sales. Spend $2,275, earn $40-50,000. You don’t need to have majored in advanced math and rocket science to work that one out: that is what is meant by marketing ROI!

Results of direct mail marketing vary from business to business but the principle holds and always works: if you send out enough promotion, you will make sales and maximize your marketing ROI. Don’t worry about response rate if your marketing ROI is high.