Tips for Successful Direct Mailings

Direct Mail can be used to market your product and services off-line and to promote awareness of your products, services, and web site. Most articles written on how to market your web site also maintain an effective off-line effort is needed. Direct mail is one aspect of off-line advertising. Some of the others are newspaper, magazine, radio, and television advertising. When you are trying to build customer awareness of your products and services don’t forget to do it off-line as well.

If your direct mail campaign is to succeed, then you must acquire the knowledge of writing eye appealing attention grabbing ads that promote your product or service. Your direct mail should be geared toward the reader. It has to be brief. It has to produce results for you. Remember you only have the readers' attention for the briefest of moments.

Your first objective is to get the reader’s attention. Your headline must be large and an attention grabber. How do you read your mail? If you are like us you probably scan through it. Next time you’re scanning through your mail think about what stops you and grabs your attention. Make a note of those that do. Do this over a week of two and you should develop your own key words, phrases, and design ideas. Do the same with ads in magazines or the classified section of your newspaper. You need to get your reader involved quickly. We use "Advertise to Millions".

Once you have your readers’ attention you must pull them in with more information. Tell them how it will benefit them, how easy it can be or how inexpensive it can be. Many people stop reading because they think it will be too expensive. Sure, I’d like to advertise to millions but how much would that cost me? I probably can’t afford it. We use "Less than $1.00 per Day!"

Now we’vet told our reader they can "Advertise to Millions! Less than $1.00 per Day! " If they are interested in advertising their products or service we’vet told them they can reach an audience of millions for less than $1.00 per day. Next we have to let the reader know it’s something that they can do. Use wording like, "Easy, Simple." We use "No Experience Needed." Now our potential customers know what we offer, how much it is, and that it’s easy enough for anyone.

When that’s done there are still a couple of hurdles that need to be cleared. Perhaps your reader is thinking this sounds too good to be true. I’ll loose my shirt if I respond. To overcome this and other mental objections use words like "Guaranteed, Full Refund if Not Satisfied, or Risk Free Offer." Reduce the risks involved in accepting your offer. You won’t convince everyone but those with enough interest will continue to keep reading.

You’vet gotten your reader’s attention, told them it’s affordable, something simple enough to do, and risk free. Now quickly ask them to do something. Use words like " Limited Time Offer, Act Now! Call today! Send Your Check Today!" If you don’t arouse the readers desire to do it immediately chances are your direct mail will be put down and maybe acted upon later. Maybe not. If your direct mail is not pulling in the responses this might be the reason.

The basics we’vet covered are as follows:

Our direct mail ad reads:

Advertise to Millions!
Less than $1.00 per day!
No Experience Needed!
Full Refund if not Satisfied!
Call Today for Free Consultation!

In the body of the ad we further qualify our leads by stating exactly what products and services we offer, as well as providing the reader with many more benefits. Do not overstate, lie, or overly hype your product or services in the body. Be truthful and factual. Don’t turn your reader off. Also, make sure to include your name, address, and how they can contact you if they have questions or desire to place an order.

Those are the basics for an effective direct mail promotion. They can also be applied to writing classified ads as well.

At Biz-Sites we mail postcards to a list of new business owners every week. Anywhere from 500 – 800 postcards. The benefits of using postcards are they don’t have to be opened, your message is right there, and they are less expensive than letters. We purchase theme-designed postcards from Paper Direct (1-800-A-Papers) and we’vet seen other companies sell them as well. They come 4 postcards to an 8½ X 11 sheet of paper and cost about $0.10 each. They break apart cleanly and give us a nice image. Certainly a more professional appearance than a plain postcard.

We use MS Publisher to print our attention grabbers on the front and the text body on the backside. By printing them in house we can try different messages each week. They are easy to change when needed. We print them up in our spare time and have enough ready to go each week when we generate our list. When we receive our list of names we use the mail merge feature of MS Publisher 97 to address them. We started by printing labels and attaching them but quickly grew tired of that. We now can have our postcards delivered to the mailbox in less than 3 hours after receipt of the list.

If you are having troubles getting Publisher 97 to print a different address on each postcard email us and we’ll tell you how we overcome this minor obstacle. We figured it out ourselves after Microsoft Tech Support told us it couldn’t be done! Yes you can break the postcards apart before printing the addresses but we found it to be easier to keep them four to a sheet, print the names, attach the stamps, and then break them apart. It’s easier to deal with 200 sheets of 8½ X 11 paper than 800 postcards. Do whatever works in your situation.

Do you need a mailing list? Our list features new business listings. These are mostly new businesses and cover the entire spectrum from small businesses, home based businesses, to larger businesses. If you’d like to mail to this target market please contact Biz-Sites. It includes contact names, business names, addresses, and some telephone numbers. It is available in IBM PC compatible format only. It is generated in a *.dbf format which we’vet been able to import directly into MS Publisher 97 (using the mail merge function), and MS Excel 97. Contact us if you require a different format. We offer our list for $70.00 per thousand names (that’s only 7 cents per name) emailed to you every two weeks, $100.00 per thousand names mailed on disk to you every two weeks, or $200.00 per thousand names when we print them on labels and mail the labels to you. Call, write, or email if you’d like quotes on full service mailing where we would do everything, print the postcards, address them, affix postage and mail them for you.

You may be wondering why we are mailing every week but are only offering our list every other week? It’s for your benefit. Even though these are new business listings (registered with in the past month) we do receive postcards returned undeliverable for various reasons. It doesn’t make much sense to go through the trouble of listing a new business and then give an incorrect or outdated address but it happens. We delete these ‘bad apples’ from our list before reselling it. You save on your costs. We can’t guarantee all the names will be good but we will definitely remove the bad ones we know about prior to selling it to you. You are also welcome to receive the current list as soon as we do provided you understand that it won’t be cleaned up.

If this list meets your needs or you would like to try it please contact Biz-Sites. You are welcome to make a one time purchase as a trial or sign on to receive the list as often as you’d like. We find it to be an inexpensive and effective to market off-line Give it a try! Contact Biz-Sites Today!