Direct Mail, when it’s done right will be one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. Jonathon Hooper explains how…

Look at the picture accompanying this article. That’s what your Direct Mail should be doing to your customers. You don’t have long to grab their attention so don’t mess around! Direct Mail should be just that. DIRECT. As Bill Cockburn [Institute of Direct Marketing] states, “The message must make an impact within the first seven seconds. That is the creative moment of truth.” I disagree with Bill. I reckon it’s closer to four seconds.
Dramatise

The key to making a memorable and effective direct mail campaign is to dramatise your message

To give you some more examples – a Jewish Charity sent out a small cardboard box. The box contained a real apple! When the box was unfolded it read on the inside “We apologise if this apple has been damaged in transit – but in life we all take a few knocks and bruises. There are seeds of hope in every apple.” The package, asking for a donation, was attention grabbing, emotive, memorable and very effective.

At Alpha we once sent a cylindrical container that said “open me”. When you did a snake jumped out with a high pitched squeal. On his tail it read – “Alpha – For marketing that jumps out at you”. You wouldn’t believe what this cheeky trick did for our recognition throughout the Midlands. Luckily no-one had a heart attack – but we had several customers calling in laughing down the phone, and new leads were calling us by the dozen. The Alpha snake was passed from colleague to colleague and talked about for months. This was one of the most hard-working and fun creative concepts we’ve ever had the fortune of producing.

One single effective direct mail campaign – one which aptly and uniquely dramatises your message – can not only make you new customers, it can revolutionise your company’s image.

Who?

Start with decent data

It’s this simple. The Most-Ingenious-Direct-Mail-In-The-World becomes The-Stupidest-Direct-Mail-In-The-World if you do not have the right data.

Knowing who to target with your offer might seem straightforward – but it very often defies logic! Let me illustrate this. Let’s say you want to sell a book called “Doing up your new house” through direct mail. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the address of everyone that has recently moved house? Wouldn’t that be the best possible list for your product?! To answer the first question, if you know where to look you can get this list! But to answer the second question, NO. Surprisingly, you’ll get a better response rate from a list of consumers who are known to already buy from direct mail, regardless of whether they recently moved homes! Reader’s Digest has proven this time and again. Of course the best possible solution would be to cross reference the two lists to come up with a much smaller list of recent home buyers who also buy from direct mail. It will save you a packet on wasted mailing costs.

How?

Simply targeting the right people with your offer isn’t the golden ticket to responses. To make someone respond you have to work incredibly hard. Reader’s Digest make you believe you have to respond by
suggesting you are close to winning £250,000.00 in their prize draw.

Coupled with well honed data of people who respond to this type of marketing, and an aggressive sales pitch, they achieve a response rate of around 30%.

Now it’s unlikely that a prize draw will work for a typical B2B. However offering incentives (eg. a free bottle of wine) when the recipient requests further information from your company can certainly tip the balance in your favour. The problem with concentrating too heavily on the gift is that you’ll get a higher response, but the quality may be lower (in other words, people will respond simply to receive the gift and not the product). And you might think that a “gimmicky free gift” could cheapen your brand image – and you might be right. Luckily there are more sophisticated methods that will achieve the same result. The trick is knowing how to choose the right incentive, then getting the balance right between the incentive and the product itself, whilst also projecting the right image of your company. It is a tricky balancing act which is why it pays for you to consult the experts.

The message must make an impact within the first seven seconds. That is the creative moment of
Tantalising (yet clear) copy

It’s about discerning the most persuasive benefits – the ones that will really excite your customers – and saying them concisely and clearly. Out with waffle. Out with needless company history, philosophies, and industry jargon. Out with the corporate cliches and “sales slickery”. Imagine you are sitting in front of your customer and explaining how you can help him. Use emotional and chatty language. Write how you talk! Think how you can personalise the package to your customer and make him or her feel special.

And crucially, don’t overload your customers. A good copywriter will reveal the most convincing benefits of your product or service and do so in a way that speaks true to your customers.
Call to action.

Most companies think a call to action is simply slapping a “CALL JOHN ON 0845 101 978 NOW). This is NOT a call to action! You need to be much more persuasive than that!! The key to successful direct mail is to encourage a genuine feeling of urgency. For instance, a simple trick is to offer a final incentive for rapid response. “Respond within 7 days to receive a 10% discount/ free gift etc…” Another common method is to remind customers that stocks are limited so a quick response is needed. The reason we must encourage urgency is because when it comes to response, we humans are as lethargic as sloths with the memories of goldfish. We might read and enjoy the direct mailer, make a conscious decision to reply in the near future, but then put it off through sloth-like lethargy – only to inevitably forget about it like the proverbial goldfish. There are 101 clever ways of heightening the sense of urgency which we unfortunately do not have time to go into now. I will be discussing the most interesting techniques during Alpha Workshops (see box at end of article).

Avoid the unexceptional

Be different. Be unexpected. Grab your customer by the short and curlies. Shake him around – shock him with such a creative idea that he tells his friends about you. Do anything you can to make an impression – just don’t (pleeeaze) be boring.

Imagine you are selling flowers in a market. Everyone is also selling flowers. Who sells the most? You can bet it’ll be the salesperson who dares to be the cheekiest.

I could continue. I could discuss the power of personalising your mailings and offer secrets of how to do this cheaply and effectively (you wouldn’t believe the possibilities technology now offers to you). I could talk about the power of commands compared to suggestion, the use of emotional words, the way reorganising a sentence can give power to a certain idea – I could explain ways to put key positive ideas into your customers’ heads, and ways to bury the possible negative thoughts and inhibitions. But I am getting close to the bottom of this page and I don’t want to give away all the tricks of the trade. As there is so much to say, myself and The Alpha Design and Marketing Group is offering Workshops to companies interested in improving their direct mail. See below for more info.