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Make a lot of money? Nope. That's easy too (if you follow my
methods).
No, the three most important things are: 1. Get your letter
delivered. 2. Get your letter opened. 3. Get your letter
read.
I want you to engrave the above list
on your heart. Don't you ever forget these three things. If you do forget
them, even once, then it will cost you a great
deal of money. And don't come crying to me either, because I'll just say
"Nyah, nyah, nyah....I told you so." Look, you might think this list
is trivial. After all, it doesn't say anything about the product,
the price or the sales
message. Yeh, I know that, but think about it. If your letter doesn't get delivered,
then who cares about the product, the price or the pitch? If your letter gets
delivered, but doesn't get opened,
then ditto, ditto, ditto. If your letter gets opened, but immediately binned after a
quick glance at the contents, then...well, you've got the idea.
What's that? Why should your letter not be delivered? Simple, bozo. If
you send it bulk delivery, mailsort etc., then you might as well stick a large
day-glow label on the front of it saying: "Dear Postman, This letter is totally
unimportant junk-mail. Deliver it if you feel like it, but otherwise, don't
bother. In fact if you ditch it, you can get home early for a cup of tea."
For the postmen amongst you, I'm not saying that all bulk mail gets
dumped. But do you want to take that chance?
Do I hear you ask, "Why should my letters go unopened?"
Because, dummy, people (and that probably means you) sort their mail over
a waste paper bin. I certainly do. Here's what I do in my house:
I grab the mail each morning, and there are usually about ten letters
(remember this is my home, not my business). Six of these at
least will be 'junk mail' from various companies. Since I'm officially
classified as a 'rich bastard', I seem to find myself on almost every mailing
list in existence. Anything that even looks like a mail-shot goes straight into
the bin....unopened. I don't even glance at the contents. All that fancy
artwork, all those award-winning graphics, all those 'teaser' lines ("You
have won, Mr Goldsmith, a prize....."), all those intriguing little lumps,
silver keys, gold discs, tokens, vouchers, all that
total garbage simply serves to signal to your customers that they have
received yet another piece of junk mail. You might as well stick a large warning
label on each envelope which says: Warning: This envelope contains a whole fist-full of total
junk. When you open it, you will be bombarded with fancy graphics, clever-clever
sales ideas and a nightmarish tangle of typefaces and colours. We hereby guarantee
that bits of this multi-part mailing will fall out over your floor. You will
have no idea where this mailing starts or ends, and you will have to work really
hard to discover what the hell it is we're trying to sell you. You should
feel an overwhelming desire to throw the whole lot into the bin. This is normal.
This stuff costs a fortune to print, create and mail, and yet it goes
into my bin (and probably yours too) completely
unopened.
If you are lucky enough to get your letter delivered, and opened, why
should people not read your letter?
Because once they see the wedge of glossy rubbish inside, their immediate
reaction is, "Bleah!!!" and
they toss the whole lot into the bin. You see most people are 'ditchers' (like
me), or 'peekers'. They either ditch the junk mail unopened, or they slit the
envelope and 'peek' inside without removing the contents. The only people I
reckon who actually open and read obvious junk-mail are the following: 1. Complete raving lunatics and sad losers who have
nothing better to do! 2. People who are expecting a particular offer, or who
are very receptive to particular offers. For example they might belong to a CD
mail-order club, and so if a mailing with Acme CD Co. comes through the
letterbox, they will open it with interest.
In general though, I'm talking about 'cold' mailings.
Now I want to make an important point. It is this. Although I call this
stuff 'junk-mail', I don't really mean to imply that all of it is totally
worthless, and of no interest to me. In fact because I am a 'ditcher', I
probably miss out on the odd bit of direct-mail which would offer me something
of real interest. But I toss the good out with the bad. Why? Because I don't
have the time or patience to wade through all that stuff, and also I hate
being sold anything before I've had my cornflakes!. This latter point is
actually quite important. You see: A Successful Sale Depends Upon Timing
Engrave this on your heart also.
Most people, when they open a mailing, quickly decide whether or not it
is trying to get them to buy something. To check this, they will read the first two lines
of the mailing, and then skip to the back to see if there is an order form. Then
they look at the price of the product, decide that it is too expensive (whatever
the price), and then toss the whole lot in the bin! It's a bit like a sales
person having eleven seconds to make his pitch before you force him to give you
the price. No sales person could cope with this because every customer needs to
be 'warmed over' before you can close a sale. He has to be wooed a little. The
advantages of the product have to be explained. You have to tell them that
although it seems expensive at £X, it really is quite cheap compared to the
money he will save, etc. etc. This is not a 'con'. You don't lie about the
product, you just need a fair crack at explaining why the customer should buy
it.
OK, you're convinced. So how do you get your letter delivered, opened,
and read?
Well, I know this sounds outrageous. I know it's
revolutionary, but might I dare to suggest that what people (= you) actually
enjoy receiving, opening and reading are.....honest to goodness letters!
I mean, that's what people actually want to receive - letters, not junk mail. Do
you want to receive junk-mail? I don't. But hey, I love
getting letters from people.
So what distinguishes a 'letter' from a piece of junk-mail? Well, here
are the ideal features your mailing should have: 1. Junk-mail comes without
a stamp. Usually it is bulk rate,
or mailsort. This immediately flags it as junk mail. In contrast, your mailings will always
have an honest-to-goodness postage stamp.
Depending on the value of each sale you hope to make, you will use a first-class stamp for any sale with a value in excess of £80. For
sales of less than this, you have to use a second class
stamp for economy. But always, always, always use a postage stamp. This single
fact alone will make a big difference to your response. 2. Junk-mail carries a load of extra printing (other
than the name and address) on the front and/or rear of the envelope. This
immediately tells you it is junk-mail. For example, there
might be 'teaser' copy on the front of the envelope saying: "Details
of the prize you have already won are
inside this envelope."
Your mailings will only carry the name and address of the recipient on
the envelope, and no
other writing or printing of any
description. For a truly perfect mailing, the address should be hand-written in blue ink,
but I have to admit this is hard to achieve for a large
mailing, and the one concession I make on my mailings is to use a printed
address label. Not perfect, but it works. 3. Junk-mail comes in all sorts of 'fancy' envelopes.
Odd shapes, windows, colours etc.
Your mailings will always go
out in plain, white, standard envelopes, usually 'C5' size. 4. Junk-mail often feels bulky. When you pick up a
junk-mail envelope it feels crammed full of stuff. Often there are mysterious
'lumps' in the envelope which are intended to make you want to open the
envelope. (It makes me want to call the bomb squad!)
Your mailings will feel light, and only contain a few (up to ten) pages
of information. You will never put anything
'bulky' in the envelope, as this flags the recipient that it is junk-mail. 5. If/when you open junk mail, a load of loose, glossy
stuff falls out. This stuff will be printed in very bright colours. There will
usually be at least six seemingly unconnected bits of glossy
print work. You will have to struggle to work out which bit to read
first, and what the
connection is, if any, between the various pieces in the envelope.
Your mailings will rarely
contain anything glossy or printed in colour, although there are
some obvious exceptions. In general, your mailing will contain......a
letter. Yep, that's all. A letter of a few
pages, 'typed' onto 'vellum' type letter paper, containing a name and address at
the top, 'typed', a date and a time. The last page of the letter should be
'signed' by you. There should be nothing about the contents of your envelope
which even hint at the fact that you are trying to sell something. The customer
should be well into reading the letter before he or she realises that you are
trying to make a sale.
Let me remind you what you are trying to achieve: 1. Get your letter delivered.
You will do this because it is stamped mail. 2. Get your letter opened.
You will achieve this, because it
doesn't look like junk-mail. of course they might suspect that it is sales
material, but at least they will open it. 3. Get your letter
read. Again, because your mailing looks like, and indeed is, a regular, honest-to-goodness
letter, this will ensure that at least some of it gets looked at. Because no
order forms or glossy stuff drops out of the envelope, this ensures that you at
least get the person to look at your material. 4. Finally, all you are trying to achieve here is to be
given a fair crack of the whip at
selling your product. If they don't want to buy, then fine. That's OK. But at
least they gave you a hearing. No sales person can ask for more than a fair
hearing. But the amazing thing is that all that junk-mail they send often
doesn't even get delivered. Only about one in five people
open it, and only about one in ten people who open it, read it! So for
every fifty glossy, fancy mail-shots they produce, only about one of them
gets read! In contrast, almost ALL of your mail will be delivered, almost ALL of
it will be opened, and almost all of the people will at least read some of your
letter, and quite a few of them will read it all.
I hope that you are following this, and taking it all to heart.
Now the really amazing bonus
about all this for you, as a start-up business, is the following:
It happens to cost a small fortune to design, print and mail one of
those glossy junk-mail pieces. In contrast, it costs fiddling small change to
send an honest-to-goodness letter to people.
It doesn't often pan-out that way, does it? I mean the fact that it's actually cheaper to do the job properly, rather than to botch it!
So, am I saying that all of these large companies who send all of these
multi-part, glossy, 'clever' mailings don't know what the hell they're doing? You bet your ass I am!
You see, these huge companies either retain a fancy, expensive agency to
do all of their mailing work for them, or they have their own fancy, expensive
in-house direct-mail department. It doesn't matter which way they operate
because in either case they are carrying this huge burden of 'creative' types,
some of whom have degrees in 'fine art' and 'creative media solutions' and all
of that old cobblers! Most (not all, but most) of these people have never, never
been 'out there' on their own, using
their own money to try and make a mailing work. Most of them have no real interest in the product, the client or the result. They are
simply interested in protecting their ass if things go wrong, and protecting
their grossly inflated salaries!
They've been to college, they've read all of those big, thick textbooks
on marketing, and direct-mail, and they look at everyone else's direct-mail
campaigns. They see how other people are doing it, and so they think that this must be the right way, and anyway, it agrees with what the textbooks
say. So they go right ahead and copy everyone else! And, of course, it's not
their money they're blowing, it's just a wedge of some huge corporate budget.
They can indulge their silly artistic whims and fantasies at
someone else's expense. Of course, the mailings have to get some
results, and indeed they do. It's just that they don't realise that they could
easily double or triple their response by using some common sense! They have no
interest in doing this, because if they did,
half of them would be sacked! I
mean, what do you want a whole department-full of creative artistic types for,
if you're just sending out 'typed' letters! You don't!
By the way, advertising agencies have a very neat way of wriggling out of
the consequences of their lousy mailings. If the response is truly terrible, and
only a few people buy the product as a result of being mailed, they will simply
point to the fact that the 'Corporate Profile' has been raised in the mind of
the public, and so they will be more inclined to buy at a later date! This is
largely bullshit!
Anyway, as far as you're concerned, the only important thing is to get
the maximum possible response
to your mailing, because this will bring you in the most money. Techniques
Of Creating The Mail Shot
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