Posted by: Troy White
September 17, 2009
Issue #761

The Easy Way to Boost Sales by 163%

In this issue:

• The F*@!#N dinner campaign that broke all kind of sales records …

• Getting a 50% response rate to a one time mailer …

• How to leverage “the diaper mailer” …

• And Much More!

Fellow Business-Builder,

A Direct Mail Information Service survey found that 78 percent actually want to get mailings from you. Combine that with your own highly targeted campaigns — ones that make full use of your customer data — and you’ve got a winning combination.

Just to add fuel to the fire:

• 70% of Generation Y have stated that they respond to print direct mail (vs. 68% Generation X and 61% Boomers) – 2007 Veritas Customer Focus.
• 90% will open their mail if it looks interesting or intriguing (vs. 84% will open it if it has their name on it) – NOTE: people are more likely to open it if it looks interesting than if it has their name on it – Consumer Attitudes Towards Direct Mail Study.
• 163% are more likely to buy from a website if they see a printed direct mail piece than if they saw digital e-mail only – 2007 Multichannel Direct Mail Study, comScore Inc.
• 73% prefer print direct mail for offers and information – only 18% said they prefer e-mail.
• Those who received a promotional product in a dimensional package responded at a rate that was 57% higher than those who received the same promotional product in an envelope - Baylor University.
• Response rates for the dimensional package recipients were 75% higher than for the group who received only a sales letter - Baylor University.

People WANT to be intrigued by your mailing piece
– Is regular print cutting it?

Take Knorr’s new launch of a frozen food line. 

First, they know exactly what people typically think of frozen meals – ugh.  Blah.  Not very tasty.  So they used that as part of their campaign. 

Second, they pushed the edge a little – especially when you consider they are quite a traditional company – not exactly ones to push it that far.

They wanted to target a younger audience than they were used to (those less likely to want to spend their time in the kitchen cooking a gourmet dinner). 

But they also wanted to target a 25-35 year old professional women, one who enjoys a glass of wine over dinner. 

Great market that is highly focused
and has disposable income.

Based on their own in-house list, combined with a list from a partner company, they were able to put together a very desirable list for their offer. 

Step #1, they gave a coupon for a free $8.99 dinner to this exact demographic group. The next closest niche group they could find, they mailed a lower end coupon for ready-to-serve soup, worth $3.99. 

The front of the direct mail piece reads:

To reveal the full message, put this in your freezer …

F*@!#N
Delicious

(showing a picture of a scrumptious shrimp
and pasta bowl underneath the headline)

When you put it in the freezer, the message changed to (using temperature sensitive ink) :

To reveal the full message, put this in your freezer …

FROZEN
Delicious

It worked incredibly well for them.

Stepping into a very risqué type of marketing (the other ads they ran all used the F*@!#N concept – “Not your mom’s F*@!#N dinners”).

The most targeted list received over 50% response, with a 10% overall response rate from all different list segments. 

They sold out all the products in the first run and had to plan carefully for subsequent mailings. 

Or, what about the Nova Scotia-based golf course that mailed sports writers who had recently played one of the five courses around? 

Included with the mailing was a beat up old golf ball with a simple 1-page letter:

“While doing some routine maintenance on the course, the ground crew found this ball in the sand trap or water hole, and an eyewitness thought it might be yours.  And, by the way, we’d love you to come back and we can help you plan your trip …”

Brilliant!

So was their response. 

They were deluged with phone calls both to book further golf trips, plus to compliment them on the very intelligent piece.

My point is that every single one of us should be using more creativity in our mailers.  The copy is king – but your customers WANT MORE from you. 

More fun.
More interactivity.
More unusual marketing pieces.

For example, why not do a Web card (a postcard showing a screen shot of your website) with a highlighted section on your website – make a secret clickable link that would not be noticeable otherwise – forcing them to go to your website to check out the link?

Or you can borrow this idea from a piece I received.  A nice, shiny, blue metallic envelope shows up in my mailbox one day. 

Inside is a one page letter and a diaper.

The actual letter teases you with some very targeted copy.

They know who you are, what you do for a living, and what your main area of interest is. 

In order to find out what the diaper is for, and to find out what this is all about, you need to go to a special website – www.whatsthediaperfor.com. (It is no longer live, so you won’t find anything there.) 

Makes it difficult NOT to check out the site.

Which is the exact point. 

There are hundreds and hundreds of gimmicky things you can use in your mailings to bulk them up and make them more compelling. 

People want to be entertained (and sold), so make sure
you are giving them what they want.

There are a few ways you can find ideas for your business here:

1. Find related products to your industry niche, your product, or your target market.  Talk to promotional companies to see what they can find for you. (They typically have bookshelves FULL of catalogs they can pull ideas from.)
2. Talk to pop-up creators (Not the Web page pop-ups, but the physical ones that can create pop-up people, buildings, clothing, animals … or pretty well anything else you can imagine.)  Search for pop-up direct mail or dimensional direct mail with your industry in the search term – see what you find.
3. Use a one-page creativity initiator, like this one I created:

Action Figures	Art classes	Airplanes	Archery	Board games	Basketball	Baking
Baton twirling	Blackboards and chalk	Beanbags	Biking	Binoculars	Bird watching	Blocks
Butterflies	Bowling	Cap guns	Cracker Jacks	Clay Creations	Caterpillars	Cots
Books	Boomerangs	Bubbles	Bug Collections	Boat sailing and building	Card games	Carpentry
Cards	Costumes	Chess	Candles	Camping	Checkers	Cats
Clay molding	Construction	Coloring books	Cartoons	Chalk boards and drawing	Cars	Cooking
Computer games	Crayons	Chemistry	Dancing	Dollhouses	Dogs	Dominoes
Dolls	Drumming	Dune buggy	Electric toys	Exercise	Elephants	Elegant party
Dice	Dreams	Energy	Football	Firecrackers	Frisbee	Finger painting
Flower pressing	Finances	Forts	Guitar	Games	Gardens	Garages
Golf	Gymnastics	Hunting for bugs	Horseshoes	Haunting	Harmonica	Harp
Hammocks	Horoscopes	Helicopters	Hiking	Hockey	Jewelry making	Juggling
Jumping rope	Kaleidoscopes	Kites	Knitting	Letter writing	Listening to music	Lumber
Mummies	Magic tricks	Magnets	Microscope	Magnifying glass	Marbles	Marionettes
Model making	Musical instruments	Masks	Nature walks	Needle point	Paper airplanes	Paper-mache
Plants	Pipes	Photography	Piano	Playgrounds	Ping pong	Poster coloring
Puppet making and play	Pool	Puzzles	Rocks	Remote control cars, boats planes	Reading	Robots
Slides	Skiing	Snowmen	Star gazing	Scare Crows	Silk Screen	Soap Making
Ships	Sleds	Science	Scrap books	Scrap yards	Sand boxes	Rope
Skating	Stamp collecting	Skateboarding	Sketching	Tires – old tires and tubes	Twister	Trampoline
Tea Party	Tents	Trading cards	Telescopes	Swimming	Strings	Stickers
Train sets	Tools	Traveling	Violin	Volleyball	Video games	Walking
Whistling	Wagons	Whittling	Walkie-Talkies	Writing	Xylophone	Wilderness
Yoga	View-Master	Yo-Yos	Yarn	Zebras	Zipper	Zoo trips

4. Use a site like www.orientaltrading.com – Thousands of ideas are there for you – at incredibly reasonable prices.
5. Talk to direct marketers who specialize in dimensional mailings.
6. Talk to packaging experts.  There are lots of freelance packaging experts out there who are used to producing product packaging and would welcome the opportunity to be more creative with a new type of mailing piece - like the one direct marketer I know of in Canada who used a packaging expert to design a mock-up shipping carton with "live animal" written on the outside, straw sticking out of it, and a surprise inside.  This mailing piece was responsible for over $1.6 million dollars in new revenues for him.

It doesn’t take much to stand out from the crowd these days in print mail – many people are getting cheaper and cheaper in their marketing and moving from print to digital, despite the response rates. 

I have personally mailed many a bizarre thing — Halloween masks, bells, dollar bills, coins, cartoons, hats, MP3 players, memory sticks, garden seeds, etc. — and have always been very happy with the results I got.

If you are feeling a little sluggish in the sales department, maybe now is the perfect time to try something new!

To your success,

Troy White
Editor, Small Business Mastery
Supplement to THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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Looking for past issues of The Total Package? Click here for our archives.

A Final Note:

If you have specific subjects you would like addressed, or have any comments on what you have seen here, please submit a comment below and I will see how I can help.

"Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

–Napoleon Hill

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13 Comments »

1. Comment by Rob — September 17, 2009 @ 10:28 am

   I found this very compelling and it immediately sent my brain scrambling like a two year old at a county fair for ideas.

   Having that said, there has to be be a way to duplicate online with squeeze pages and sales letters….

   Just can’t put a finger on it at the moment.

2. Comment by Tony Seymour — September 17, 2009 @ 11:10 am

   Awesome. I will definitely use the “used golf ball” letter. Thanks so much !

3. Comment by MARLIN — September 17, 2009 @ 11:44 am

   What is a dimensional mailing?

4. Comment by Troy White — September 17, 2009 @ 12:00 pm

   Hi Marlin,

   Dimensional mail means 3 dimensional.

   So rather than just a letter, you send a letter with a puzzle piece attached, or a letter inside a small garbage can, or a letter with a bell attached to it.

   All of these I have used with great success. They stand out and quickly get peoples attention.

   Like the letter I just received from a take-out pizza place. It came with a bag of flour attached to the letter and explains why their flour is far superior to anything else on the market.

   Rather than sending just a brochure like every other pizza place does, they sent a letter (with bag of flour) AND the brochure.

   The letter gets you to pay attention to the brochure - and it got my business (their pizzas are ~ 20% higher in price than others… but their story was great and they did some dramatically different things to earn my business.

   It doesn’t take much… just some new approaches. Dimensional mail is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

   Hope that helps?

   Troy

5. Comment by Clarke Echols (Resident scientist and rabble-rouser) — September 17, 2009 @ 1:04 pm

   The print vs. email messages takes me back to the 1990s at HP where I was a senior technical writer and learning products engineer.

   The big fuss around the company was print is too expensive (we were printing a 3000-page Unix reference manual I maintained at the time for $12/3-volume copy!), and they wanted to move to digitally displayed text because people aren’t going to be reading books anymore.

   My counter argument was: “When’s the last time you curled up to read a nice book in digital form?”

   You can’t conveniently highlight and mark up an online document with personal notes and reminders. You can’t set it aside with a convenient bookmark, then come back to the same spot the next night and continue.

   I get a lot of ebooks from people known to the readers of this blog. My preference?: Print it out, put it in a binder, and read it in print form. I bought a big HP LaserJet with 1000-sheet trays so I can print fast and conveniently and use big toner cartridges for serious work.

   And I go through mearly all of my mail. My wife used to sort and pitch the junk mail so I didn’t know about it, but that doesn’t happen now. Some I look at only briefly before discarding, but anything that looks more useful than the coupon packages gets reviewed.

   I much prefer print for most stuff unless it’s from AWAI, Clayton, or others where I keep some on file for future reference.

   Another reason for print is I use them as examples when I talk with prospective clients about *why* they need a good direct-response marketer instead of a “marketing group” doing their stuff. Some of these poor suckers have really bought into the song and dance coming from these promoters who talk about “creating buzz for your business”, building your image, or your brand.

   It can be difficult to help them understand why a card-size piece shouldn’t have a call to action as the headline, but if you have other better-written pieces to compare, it’s easier to educate them. And I want educated clients who understand why what I do is better for their business instead of blindly accepting marketing-group whizzy-bang snake oil.

   I went to the website of an ad agency in Denver recently, and they didn’t give me a single indication that they understood my problem or how they could help me solve it.

   And the “case studies” they presented weren’t case studies at all. They were short video clips of inane subjects with no connection at all to what I’d find interesting, and one was for a service provider I’ve actually done business with many times! Pathetic…

   This is a most enlightening and informative revelation. Thanks for bringing it to light!

   CE

6. Comment by Troy White — September 17, 2009 @ 3:21 pm

   Hi Clarke, I used to work for HP as well… small world. I was in sales in their Unix system servers and storage group. Great company… I only lasted 3 years as that big corporate world wasn’t quite my thing.

   I went from HP, with 150,000 employees to a company of 5 people!

   Took a pay cut… but ohhhhhh so much happier.

   I am with you on the digital stuff. A few of them I will read - almost all of the decent ones are printed, put in binders, and in a reference shelf close by.

   Nothing I hate more than trying to find a pdf file I need.

   Thanks as always! Troy

7. Comment by Paul Flood — September 18, 2009 @ 10:05 am

   Pretty compelling stats Troy and I like the brainstorming matrix idea.

   The added benefit of the promotional product inclusions is that the people who keep them tend to retain a favorable image of the company that sent it to them. Here’s an article about a study conducted a few years back by Georgia Southern University about the impact of promotional products http://www.ppa.org/Buyer/How+Do+I/Learn+More+About+Promotional+Products.

   The conclusions of the study relate to branding, image and awareness rather than quantifiable results but the information is interesting.

   Here’s a pdf printing tool I started using a while back. I was frustrated with the waste I got with printing a regular pdf and the sometimes odd formatting results when I tried to print 2 pages per sheet. I’ve saved a lot of paper and ink and it’s pretty easy.

   It’s called FinePrint and it’s free. The site is http://www.fineprint.com.

   I have no affiliate or other relationship with them but since the subject of printing pdf’s came up and this has been a good tool for me, I thought I’d pass it along.

8. Comment by Troy White — September 18, 2009 @ 10:55 am

   Thanks Paul. Great resources there! Troy

9. Comment by lolita romero — September 18, 2009 @ 8:42 pm

   i would like to meet people here this is lolita romero i am 27 yerls old single i dont know how did i say hope that you can email in my sexylits13@yahoo.com and my cell is 0639289393100 hope to hear from you people godbless you and your company

10. Comment by Glen Kohlenberg — September 19, 2009 @ 9:50 am

    Troy, thanks for the gift. This is a header I want to use on a special made envelope.

    “You Can Vacation Anywhere In The World”
    But Only 1 Beach Has Pillow Soft Sand

    P.S. I Sent You Some

    My question is should I send the sand loose in the envelope or in a small baggie?

    The sand is from Clayton’s Favorite Beach[Siesta Key]

    I’ll also take some advise from the masters on the headline?

    Thanks

11. Comment by Troy White — September 21, 2009 @ 10:26 am

    Hi Glen,

    Definitely keep the sand in a small bag.

    Nothing would irritate people more than opening an envelope and having the sand pour all over their documents, in their food, maybe in their computer keyboard…

    …not a good way to start :o)

    A few headline variations (just off the top of head, more time definitely needs to be spent on this area alone)

    * An Invitation To Test Drive The Softest White Sand Beach In The World

    * Little Known Beach Town Claims #1 Spot For White Sand ‘Fluffiness’

    * Revealed: The World’s Best White Sand Haven

    * You haven’t experienced the world until you’ve napped on this secretive white sand beach

    * 8 Reasons This White Sand Beach Will Change Your Future

    * Little Known Beach Town Shares Their Secret For The Softest Sand In The World

    * If Only They Could Make Beds With Sand This Soft… Can You Pass The Nap Test With Your Favorite Beach?

    Not the best, but a few ideas that may spark something.

    Troy

12. Comment by Eric Grimstead — September 22, 2009 @ 4:49 pm

    Following on Troy’s headline suggestions you could take the words from the current hit C&W song “Toes” and modify for your own - could make for great intro copy to the letter, goes a little somethin’ like this…

    I got my toes in the water,
    ass in the sand
    Not a worry in the world,
    a cold beer in my hand
    Life is good today.
    Life is good today.

    Eric

13. Comment by Gavin L — September 24, 2009 @ 4:10 pm

    Another great site to check out is http://www.3dmailresults.com They have a lot of great ideas as well. They ‘get’ the direct response stuff, too.