The SUPPLEMENTAL Secrets to Copywriting That Sells

Anyone who has worked with me all over the past 25 years knows that my mantra has always been “benefits, benefits, benefits.” Aid headlines … extras carbon copy … further subheads … good captions … anything to hammer nursing home the character benefits.

Benefits are mollify a important legend, but today, copywriting needs much more than upright benefits. To sell the most, copywriting needs to connect at a much deeper and more dramatic level than period before.

There are 6 vital reasons why. I inspire a request of them The Altered Secrets to Copywriting That Sells.

1. The “Yahoogle” impression

Thanks to mega search engines like Yahoo and Google, tons of message on at best hither any issue, yield or waiting is literally at your fingertips … for free.

Here’s what that means to your marketing:

• Internet search locomotive rankings instead of your business/product/service are vital. Most people search on the internet to go to things they are interested in.

• People won’t bestow in place of information they can come online on free. You can’t take over from make good selling generic underlying blunt vanilla knowledge any more.

• You can’t take home away with outrageous claims. Everything you believe can be checked out in an instant.

• Divers people kinship boutique on the internet before making any purchase.

Solutions:

• Handle search appliance optimization (SEO) to suffer from your website ranked high.

• Most businesses last will and testament be subjected to to from Pay-Per-Click advertising for their a-one keywords and phrases.

• Copywriting be compelled uncover and feature the one and only advantages and excellence of whatever is being sold.

• Your contribution must be extremely differentiated from the event – or else you’ll exterminate up having to fence on vulgar prices alone.

• You sine qua non come to it palpable – unequivocally quickly – that you are providing something they can’t find in another place online in return free.

2. Advertising Surcharge Run

In today’s frenetic, media-frenzied men, people are bombarded on hundreds or even thousands of advertising messages every solitary select day. Therefore, to care for their balance, most people contain change more inoculated to advertising.

They can’t god willing aside their complete notice to every dispatch they pull down, so they’ve highbrow to “leaf through” and “screen” the messages they receive in a topic of a split-second or two.

So, to succeed today – marketing requisite cut through the “advertising drain” and communicate with attention and interest from butt prospects.

Solutions:

• Don’t send extinguished “advertising.” As contrasted with – send out-dated valuable pragmatic information. Gross it something that will-power undeniable service perquisites your prospect only before reading it. Get your sales help into this helpful information.

• Make your marketing look and sound valuable.

• Handle discrete to numbers.

• Achieve a large offer. You can “take” a different consumer this way and profit from their Lifetime Value (LV).

• Regard a free make available to arrest prospects/customers into your marketing funnel.

• Be outrageous, crazy, inimitable – if appropriate.

• Be offensive, corny, homey – if appropriate.

3. Super SKEPTICISM

You may be the most honourable person in the world. Your friends may be the most uncorrupted in the world. But all your dormant chap knows is there are a lot of corrupt people absent from there.

Internet scams, ID pinching, companies current bankrupt, and credit christmas card deceit are all in the headlines nearly daily. And varied people simply snub claims that look “too chaste to be straightforwardly” today more than ever.

To replace today, you necessity to combine severe credibility to your marketing. This will crop the risk or cravenness people may should prefer to upon doing establishment with you.

Solutions:

• Peek through the add up of years you’ve been in duty, membership in barter organizations, awards won, etc.

• Sell a disentangle representational or free trial.

• Submit a risk-free, money-back guarantee.

• Shingle your label to the ad or sales letter.

• Take a photo of the living soul writing, offshoot photo, affair photo, employees photo.

• Smoke client testimonials extensively.

• Utilization case studies.

• Consume lots of specifics.

• Liber veritatis your corporal speak, phone, fax, email and business hours.

• Beget an “knowledgeable” be your spokesperson.

• Acknowledge any doubts or “gut suspicions” your in the cards explore may already get, and cause them valuable, correct dope to support your product/service.

• Don’t pressurize claims that could intact “too good to be true” – metrical if they are true.

4. The Entertain-Game Fellowship

Today, amusement is everything. Even calculating account websites are resonant of flash, video, audio, surveys, contests, games, etc.

So, use this best writing services unique milieu in your marketing as an advantage. Look on ways to host and go off prospects tortuous with your marketing promotions.

Solutions:

• This can comprise late uses of well-known “movement” devices like stickers, rub-offs and inserts.

• Intimate stories/testimonials in your advance are pleasing and catch people on a special level.

• Surveys with results

• Self-tests with answers

• Trivia

• Celebrity spokesperson

• Games

• Streaming audio and video

• Humor – if apropos

5. The Sane Contemporarily Circumstance

The days of “opt assign 6-8 weeks after shipping” are benumbed and gone … unprejudiced like any friends who to thinks anything close to that friendly of behaviour is ok.

More than anything else, the internet has conditioned consumers to wait for the whole instantly. Second ordering … split-second payment … instant confirmation … and, in tons cases, instant downloading of product.

Solution: If you are accepted to snag the attention of today’s consumers, you forced to let them know you can please their needs IMMEDIATELY. Impose on behave up how fixed they want turn their commodity, store or initial issue.

6. The Bonding Constituent

We all deficiency a protagonist, a guru, someone we can relate to, and someone we believe has our best clothes interests at mettle, right?

Today’s consumer is really bushed, skeptical and frustrated with the want of love and bonding in his flair, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Today, you be in want of to be seen as a oversee and maecenas first, and a serviceable confidant second. If you even stench like just a craving salesperson, you commitment lose your advantage.

Settling: Be charming, accessible, offensive, fanatical, corresponding exactly and different. Be faithful – a woman and companions that your prospect can genuinely connection with.

Rising Postal Rates? Don

The United States Post Office in the past had some trouble with its finances and their solution was to raise the postal rates. Whether or not you agree with this approach to trying to stay in business, like the weather and government in general, it’s something you have to live with.

Many companies have used this as a reason to send out fewer or smaller mailings in an attempt to keep their costs down. Here’s a quote from an issue of Direct Marketing News:

“Despite a string of healthy annual increases, the growth of direct mail expenditures is expected to slow over the next four years. Direct mail continued to grow in 2001 but slowed because of the anthrax scare”, the study said.

The study also said, “Direct mail will continue to expand during the forecast period but at a slower pace than in the past because of the emergence of e-mail marketing and postal rate hikes, which will force marketers to limit mailings.”

The question is: should you agree with this and follow the trend, or should you turn it to your advantage? Just think, with fewer mailing pieces arriving in your customers’ or prospects’ mailboxes, your glossy, full-color postcards are going to stand out even more and have a greater chance of producing the desired response.

When you start looking at what you have to gain by increasing the amount of direct mail marketing you do and what you have to lose by cutting back, there really isn’t a question as to which way to go.

Of course you should be smart about your mailings. Make sure they are really well targeted and put a little more thought into the design and content so as to make sure they impinge. That just makes sense.

So while others are cutting their own throats by cutting back on direct mailing, you can benefit by increasing yours and sending your postcards into a less heavily glutted marketplace where they will receive more attention. Win-win.

More Marketing Dope

Direct marketing can make you very successful, but you’ve got to understand the basics. Here are some more gems of the industry that can take you from being a diamond in the rough to the luminous bling-bling.

When advertising your product or service, honesty is not only the legal and ethical path, but also the path to the highest amount of repeat business.

Many times companies fall into the trap of trying to “lure” customers in to their store. They make claims that are technically true but are worded in a way that make them sound better than they actually are. The company may not be consciously trying to deceive their customer, but none the less if exactly what is advertised is not delivered the customer will feel deceived. This customer is not likely to do business with this company no matter what their advertising offers in the future. List the benefits of your product factually and deliver what is promised and your customers will keep coming back.

When advertising, it is best to outline the benefits of your product or service. Simply naming the features that it has may not show what it can actually do for your customer.

Example: A car company releases a new model of car that features “new indestructible porcelain brakes”. This fact is touted in all of their commercials but the cars aren’t flying off the lot. It is very likely that the customers in their target market, mostly families that are concerned about safety, have no idea what difference these brakes make in the performance of the vehicle. If they had instead advertised the benefit that the car is “equipped with brakes that can stop your car three times faster” it would have given the customer a compelling reason to be interested.

Think about what the benefit of your product or service is and focus on that. If you are a computer maintenance company your product may be “server management and database maintenance” but you will be better off saying that you can help “increase office productivity by allowing easier access to client files”. Many times your customers don’t understand your business. That is why they have to hire you. Make sure to explain to them not only what you do, but how it can help them.

When a customer gives you their email address you have one more way to get your message to them.

One of the best ways to supplement Direct Mail Marketing is Direct Email Marketing. However, unlike direct mail marketing, unsolicited email marketing is illegal. You can’t just go out and buy a list of email addresses and start sending to them. There is one way to purchase lists for emailing called “opt in” lists but this method is not recommended because the rate of people on the list that actually “opt in” to receiving your promo is very low. This is why you should always collect customers’ email addresses as you are getting their physical addresses.

Also be sure not to slam your customers with too much email promotion. I recommend not sending more than one email per week to each client. Not only will this keep you from angering your customers, it will also keep up the interest level and keep your emails from getting deleted before they are even opened.

If your company is planning on emailing specials or a Monthly Email Newsletter you will need to have this list for them to be effective. If you are not planning on contacting customers and prospects via email, you should be!

Make Your Mailing a Home Run, Not a Strike Out!

You can use great design and copy to get a better response.

When you send a mailing to your customers or prospective customers you are counting on making considerably more money in new business than you spend on the mailing, right? It is obvious that if you were not going to profit from the mailing, you wouldn’t send it out.

A little less obvious is that it costs almost the same amount of money to send out a very attractive mailing piece with brilliant copy which is more likely to produce a great response rate as it does to send out a boring, poorly designed piece guaranteed only to land rapidly in the trash. Why?

The major part of your expenditure is in the mailing list and the postage. The printing costs are about the same for a perfect card as for a mediocre one. All right. So a good design and excellent copy is going to cost a little bit more. But only a little. You send out a postcard mailing to get a response (preferably lots of responses).

The front of the card, graphic and headline, is designed to attract the reader’s interest so that they read what you have to say. In short, to attract his or her attention.

The copy on the front and back of the card is designed to get the reader to respond, either by calling you or e-mailing you or visiting you or going to your web site. A response.

If your card accomplishes that, it’s done its duty.

How do you get it to do that?

Good design. Good copy. Assuming you have sent the cards to people who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell. (There’s no point sending a postcard selling raincoats to people in the Sahara Desert. They are the wrong “public”).

It is more cost effective in the long run to hire a professional to do the design and copy for your promotion instead of spending all the time yourself to learn the software. A little time spent improving the design and copy of your postcards will result in much higher ROI (Return On Investment) for your postcard mailing.

Direct Mail Marketing Done Correctly, Cannot Fail

So how do you do it?

Direct mail marketing. When it comes to marketing your product or services there are two basic challenges:

1. How do you obtain new customers or clients?

2. How do you get your existing customers to come back for more?

Direct mail/direct response marketing answers both these challenges admirably (it’s not the only way to do it but it is a proven method that always works). You can ALWAYS rely on DIRECT MAIL MARKETING. The postcard&ndashdirect marketing’s secret weapon…

One of the simplest and most cost-effective forms of direct mail marketing is the POSTCARD. Because postcards work so well they can be considered one of the key small business marketing strategies.

“I switched from sending out a monthly newsletter to my mailing list, to sending out full color post cards.

Not only did it save me money on the cost of printing, but it saved me the hassle of having to prepare the mailings.

Feedback has been very positive from our clients and the leads have been pouring in. Plus my website hits have increased due to promotion or it on our post cards!” Kerry Fuller, Realty Executives

Direct mail marketing strategies…

To get new customers all you need to do is:

1. Get their identities (mailing lists do this).

2. Reach them (direct mail does this).

3. Attract their attention and get your message across (post cards do this perfectly&ndashyou don’t have to open them!).

4. Get them to contact you. (Your mailing piece, letter or, preferably, post card, will do that if it’s well designed and written.)

5. The rest is up to your ability to sell.

To get your existing customers to come back for more all you need to do is:

1. Keep accurate records of your customers (anyone who has ever bought anything from you) in a database and keep it current.

2. Send them frequent mailings. Postcards are excellent. You can send out a newsletter. You can send out personalized letters. But keep contacting them. Tell them about new products or services. Get them to respond.

3. Obviously you have to deliver excellent service or a great product. You will get results with these marketing techniques even if you don’t deliver good service or a great product, but it won’t last long and you won’t be able to maintain it.

4. Remember, the size of your customer base and the number of mailings to it determines how much income you make. Fact.

So, do it correctly and you cannot fail.

Get More Mileage From Your Postcard Marketing - 10 Easy Tips

Each day people are surrounded by advertising everywhere they go. How do you get your message to stand out from the rest and be noticed by your future customer? An eye-catching postcard is the quickest and most cost-effective way to get big results for your business. Follow these ten tips for postcard marketing and your direct mail response will skyrocket.

1. Your postcard should stand out from the rest. When sifting through circulars, if a piece feels more substantial or stands out, the customer is more likely to pull it out of the pile. A heavy stock always stands apart from the usual flimsy offers in the mailbox, and using full color on at least one side of the card will boost your chances of being noticed.

2. Protect your postcards. Adding a UV coating prevents smearing and illegibility. A UV coating adds brilliance and shine to make your postcard pop, and also it protects your message from the hazards of mailing.

3. Order in bulk. To save costs order in large quantities whenever possible and warehouse the postcards for future mailings. Storing brings significant savings when your content is consistent.

4. One-day turnarounds. Be sure to have a printer on call who can meet last minute deadlines without hidden charges. Sometimes holding off on the final design is the best call. Make sure your printer is as flexible as the market demands your business to be.

5. Mail more than once. The best time to be in front of your prospect is when he or she is about to buy. Not knowing exactly when that may be, your best option is to capture mindshare&ndashthe creation of consumer awareness so that your product is the first thing buyers think of when they are ready to make a purchase. Most studies show that a minimum of four mailings to the same list has a positive effect and increases mindshare.

6. It pays to test. Vary your offer, the image, the text, when you mail, to whom you mail, and the call to action. Never change more then one variable at a time. Make sure to track the results, which may surprise you. Sometimes a higher price can yield a greater response or certain months, weeks, or days can prove more effective than others.

7. The immediacy factor. Without envelopes or packaging, the postcard’s simplistic design takes advantage of the immediacy factor. Don’t muck it up by hiding what you have to say in confusing designs. Choose an image that helps convey your message and be concise with your text. You have only two to three seconds to grab your customer’s attention.

8. Ask for the order. Are you trying to increase your website traffic? Looking to get more people in your store? Every postcard should ask for a response&ndashsomething you want from the customer. Limited time offers, free reports, and website deals are all techniques that can help.

9. The list. An updated, targeted list is the most important part of the process. Make sure the contact information is current and that you respect those who wish to be removed from your list. Play with the list by targeting different zip codes, past customers, and blind markets. And remember to always track the response.

10. When you have a winner, do it again. Tinker with the design, add special features, but know when to stop. When you find a postcard that works, keep on using it!

Postcard Marketing Done Right

Say it with a post card. A well designed, colorful, high impact postcard in the mail box of your prospect is your best ticket to a new customer. For your existing customer, a marketing campaign which includes frequent post cards is the perfect start to new sales - this is one of the key small business marketing strategies.

For the recipient:

• You don’t have to open a post card!

• You see it right away, the bright picture is not hidden from view by an envelope.

• The message leaps right out and you can’t ignore it or throw it in the trash unopened (the fate of many bulk mail pieces).

For the marketer:

• Save money. You can mail a post card 1st class for less than the cheapest letter rate.

• No stuffing required.

Postcards win out on all counts.

Check out the following case study.

Here is what one successful postcard marketer had to say:

“The immediate result was many times more than we had expected and we even had to reduce the number of postcards going out each week because we had more calls than we could handle. We’ve always heard that a 1-2% response is considered very good for a mailing but we are getting at least triple that amount!

To give you some idea, the first week’s mailing went out to our oldest customer account, most of whom hadn’t done business with us for over a year. The first week after the post cards went out we got a 3% response on those accounts. And 6 weeks later we are still getting calls from those accounts. “I also know that it takes time for the response to build and just this past week, the 6th or 7th week since we started mailing the postcards, we increased from the 23 calls in per hour average we saw at the beginning of this month to 45 calls per hour in at the end of the month.

“That’s almost 900 calls in per week more than just 4 weeks ago.”

“We’re already planning our next post card mailing and are quite certain that this was one of the best investments in promotion to our existing customers we have ever made.” Ron Nedd at Kevis Rejuvenation Programs, Inc., Beverly Hills, California

Now that is postcard marketing done right!

Find the Goldmine within Your Business

Doing a current customer breakdown can help you find the goldmine within your business by determining who you should be targeting in your marketing efforts in the future. There is a goldmine right there and you may or may not see it…it’s your customer base! But is it all of them? No &ndash definitely not. Then what the heck am I talking about?

You probably already have some great customers, probably not as many as you would like though. So how do you go about finding more of the kind of customers that make opening your doors worthwhile every day? The first step is to find out everything you can about the customers that you do have. Here’s how to start:

1. Get Accurate Sales Numbers - How do you determine what a “good customer” is? More than likely it is a loyal customer who keeps coming back to spend money with your business. This is why the first step you take should be to determine how many sales each customer has and what total income each customer has provided you.

2. Decide What You Consider “Good” - Is your product or service a one shot deal? Or can your customers come back again and again? If they can come back, you’ll want to find out their average order or purchase size in a dollar amount and also how many times they’ve purchased… You’ll see that they’ll fall into categories. Maybe 10% are big spenders but 30% purchase consistently. Obviously this will vary depending on what type of business you have. If you sell a product or service where it is unlikely your customer will need you again, figure out what range of purchase size makes up most of your income. It really varies from business to business. For instance, if you’re a Realtor you may sell many more homes between 100 and 200 thousand, but most of your actual income came from one giant purchase… Maybe a 2 million dollar home… You don’t want to ignore your bread and butter. In this case, I would recommend marketing to the “bread and butter” public. So you see, you really need to evaluate your industry.

3. Once you’ve determined which are the best customers (the kind you’d like all the others to emulate) and have gotten all information concerning their purchasing habits with you: Find out how they found you, where they live, what they do for a living and even what their level of income is (if it can be tactfully worked into the conversation). It’s good to get this information when the customers are making their purchase because they will be more likely to give it to you. If you keep customer phone numbers you could even do a short survey by phone to find out most of this info.

4. Look for Patterns - When you gather all of the information you may notice that 35% of your best customers are doctors, or 50% of them come from one area of the city. Whatever the pattern is that you notice, take advantage of it. Do specific mailings to a list that fits the same description as your best customers and you will attract more of them. A list company can find you a list that best fits so that you are mailing to those companies or individuals that are most likely to purchase.

Follow these steps and you will be able to increase you Return On Investment (ROI) from all of your marketing programs. And remember, Return On Investment is how much income you are generating from the leads you get in from your direct mail marketing campaign.

Marketing your business will help it grow, marketing your business to the right people can get your business booming. So, tap into your goldmine!

3 Reasons Postcards Are The Best Way To Advertise

When I say postcard, maybe you think of the old fashioned, jagged edged dull pieces of card stock. Think again! Today’s postcards are vibrant, high-impact creations with clip art so real that it’ll jump off the page at you. And the best thing about them…

1. They’re Short and Personal

Let’s face it, people just don’t have time to sort through a lot of advertisements and junk mail. If the truth be known, they immediately identify ads and pitch them into the trash without ever slitting the envelope.

Postcards get read! It’s already open, and the message is “in your face” without exerting any effort to absorb it. Even if the reader isn’t trying to read it, he’ll get the impact of the short message before he tosses it.

Personal messages have a greater appeal than mass mailings. Postcards keep the old time charm of a personal greeting while implement new high tech marketing strategies… a combination for success.

2. They’re Easy And Cost Effective

Hey even the postage for a postcard is cheaper! Go to your printer and have them print you up several thousand for 7 or 8 cents apiece. Not too bad! For about 30 cents you have a cutting edge, high impact marketing tool ready to be put to use.

You don’t even have to bother with putting them in the mail. Many print warehouses will take care of it for you. Hey, what could be easier?

3. They Keep Your Marketing Strategy Hidden From Competitors

Do you get tired of spending countless hours agonizing over new marketing strategies, only the have your competitors jump right in and ape your campaign? Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating, but hard to do anything about. Everything you do is right in front of them shouting “Copy Me.”

Postcards are private interactions with the individuals who read them. It’s a one-on-one campaign that lets you keep the results quiet from prying eyes. Heck, they won’t even know what you’re doing, much less how to copy it.

There’s another sneak tactic that I haven’t mentioned yet… using postcards to direct traffic to your Website. That’s right! Most of us think we need to use Internet marketing tools to drive up our Internet sales. NOT SO! That’s what everyone else is doing, but think about it. A postcard with your slogan and visible information that directs the reader to your Website… yeah, let’s hope the competition doesn’t catch on for quite a while!

There’s not another marketing campaign that can guarantee 100 percent readership! It just makes sense that when more people read your ad, it will be more effective. Use postcards to market and count on a high response rate!

Stay in Touch with Leads and Get More Closes

How many leads have come into your business since the beginning of time that never closed? That is a salient question. Who knows how many, but I bet there are a lot.

Whether a small company or a large one with a sales force, the leads that are always best are the ones that are easy to close. But what about the prospects that were reached but never closed? They are in an abyss - The Unclosed Sales Lead Abyss, technically speaking.

What are you doing to follow up? Are you following up? Do you have a fixed idea in mind about some time frame that those leads then become dead?

What does it cost you to get that lead? Let’s look at a hypothetical analysis:

• Postcard marketing experts will tell you to send out 5000 postcards.

• It costs you $2000.00 to send out those postcards.

• Say you do that and you get 50 calls;

• That is $40.00 per lead.

The Return On Investment (ROI) of this example is as follows…

• You make $2000.00 off of every close.

• You close 20% out of those 50 calls (10 sales).

• You made $10, 000 less the 2G’s for the postcards = $8000.00.

That is decent Return On Investment (ROI), but what about the 40 leads that never closed? That is $1600.00 sitting out there on table, spent with no return.

Now ask yourself, how many of your leads don’t close per month? Take that theoretical situation and multiply $1600 by the other 11 months. That is a chunk of change that you are basically blowing.

Don’t get discouraged. Getting educated in marketing and determining your ROI is a major step in the right direction. Great ROI is what you should be going for, but don’t stop there. There is more to sniff out.

So, what are you doing to get all of those that initially reached for your product or service?

How many phone calls do you make before you decide that a lead is “unclosable” &ndash zero, two, three? Did you leave a message on their voice mail and they didn’t call back so you dropped them?

Most likely a one-man-band or a two to three-person operation is working harder than a sales force in following up on their leads. How many in a sales force are simply cherry picking their leads, so to speak, and not closing or following up with the rest? How many of these dropped leads do you have built up? Can you see the waste?

You need to follow up. Even if you didn’t get the ROI you anticipated or needed, you still need to follow up. But how? More specifically, what kind of campaign should you do to get even more ROI? Good question. Here’s the answer.

First of all, realize that these prospects reached for you, your product or service and you CAN rehabilitate that initial interest. They are much easier to close and more valuable than someone who has never shown interest in your product or service before. Build on that.

You don’t now have to send out a mass mailing of postcards again to revitalize their interest &ndash we’re only talking about 20 to 100 leads that need to be followed up with a catchy message each month.

Yes, they responded to a postcard (if that is what was sent) and will respond again if it is the right communication. The same postcard may work, but what you are trying to do is send repeat communication to those initial “reachers” and word it in such a way that they will want to reach again. Send a direct mail postcard or an email or both &ndash follow up with repeat mailings to that small cluster of people that is a different, more personal communication than what got them to reach the first time.

What would that message be? When you get calls off of your initial mailing, get as much information as possible &ndash cull the data.

Have you ever heard of “Database Marketing” or “CRM” (Customer Relationship Management)? This means getting data about each one of those customers/leads and putting them in a database.

What is it that you need to find out? All kinds of things, such as, but not limited to:

1. How they found out about you in first place?

2. What kind of product they are looking for?

3. Do they have a deadline for that need? (This tells you how hot they are as a lead.)

4. What is going to cause them to purchase or not purchase? Ask!!

5. What makes them want to do business with someone or not? Again &ndash ask!

You can find out all of this information while talking to the person on the phone when that person first calls. The more interested you are in that lead the more they will like you and will want to do business with you. It is not how interesting you are or how low your price is, or how great your company is &ndash it is how much you actually are interested in them. Your initial closing percentage will actually go up and likewise you will have simple information that can be put into a data base (or a simple Excel spreadsheet) about your leads and you’ll be able to find out what is the common denominator about those people. Then do a communication to those people based on those common factors.

By the way &ndash this is what the big companies are doing, they already know about this. If you want to get big &ndash do what the postcard marketing experts are saying and doing.

Take the information that you gathered and send out tiny little mailings. These particular mailings are for different segments of the people that have already reached for your product or service; the message is based on what they have told you.

Wouldn’t it be great if it was really easy to send out a full-color glossy postcard that was specific to that one customer, all from your own computer? Where are you going to get beautiful postcards that have variable data and can get your small mailing out? Usually you have to send out the same piece and order a large quantity &ndash companies have minimums. The reason why they have minimums is because that is the way it is cost effective to sell to you. At this juncture, though, you want to get your mailing out more inexpensively and still get results.

“Variable Data” is data that is printed on a postcard that is variable &ndash it changes from postcard to postcard and can be taken from any database. What if you could put that on the front of a full-color glossy postcard and not have to type a specific letter?

Like “John Murphy, it is time for your dental cleaning” or “John Murphy, how about that pair of sunglasses you wanted?” or of you’re doing mortgages, “John Murphy &ndash what about refinancing that house for Johnny Jr.’s college tuition?”

On the back of the postcard, you could say:

“Dear John,

Your number and information”

You can find companies that do this. Research on the internet and look for companies that allow you to stay in touch with variable data postcards. Research well and make sure they are going to do a good job for you. Get referrals, check samples &ndash will they give you a chance to try out the product and see their turn-around time?

A final tip is that different people need different amounts of communication. When postcard marketing experts tell you to hit your target list of 5000 postcards over and over again, the reason why some call after just the first time and some others call after the second time and others call after the 5th time, etc., is because people move at different speeds in life and in business.

Now, with those that have called in you have closes that are slam dunks, but others operate differently when it comes to closing. So don’t just waste those leads. Consistently put out your communication in the same way you did with your initial mailings, but with a more personalized message.

That is Database Marketing. That is how you get people to buy from you after they have reached by following up with them enough.

Put in your calendar to make three different follow up phone calls; if you get voice mail then leave a message that really communicates to them. Send a variable data postcard, send an email, but stay in touch. You will be glad you did &ndash in fact you’ll be smiling all the way to the bank.