Posted by: Troy White
April 1, 2008
Issue #386

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 web site) 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.

For example, I am hosting my Wild West Marketing and Wealth Summit this summer, and I just found some people with cowboy hats that are PERFECT for mailing pieces and for giveaways.  Open this little vinyl sack and a fully usable vinyl cowboy hat pops out of it – ready to wear.

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 a live animal 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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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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• KERPLOOEY!

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3 Comments »

1. Comment by Ernest Nicastro — April 1, 2008 @ 1:37 pm

   Great article Troy!  Here’s another unique attention-grabbing mailing idea from my own experiences.

   Here’s the story. I had a meeting with a prospective client that went very well. He was going out of town for a week but told me to call him after that and we’d set up another meeting to move forward.

   A week went by and I called. He wasn’t available so I left a voicemail. Another week went by and I didn’t hear back. So I called again. Not available. I left another message. Same result as before. I tried email and more voice mail. This goes on for a couple of months. Then one day while surfing the web I happen upon a site that sells lifesize cardboard cutouts of celebrities. Voila! An idea hit me.

   I order up an Elvis.  I’ll use "The King" to make sure I get a positive response from this guy.  When Elvis arrives I write up a letter, affix it to his right shoulder, package him up and ship him off to my elusive prospect.

   The letter began: "Dear Tom: As you know, I’ve contacted you a number of times over the last couple months. And the fact that I haven’t heard back from you, quite frankly, has me ‘All Shook Up.’" I went on to humorously – and effectively – use several other Elvis song titles and closed the letter by saying that when Tom engaged my firm’s services he would soon hear his prospects and customers singing "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You."

   The day Elvis arrived in the building I got an email from Tom with the subject line of "You Got My Attention." We went on to do a lead-generation project worth several thousand dollars to me. More importantly, I was asked to write an article about this story for Deliver Magazine, published by the USPS (on my website at http://www.positiveresponse.com/elvis.pdf). And an inquiry from that article generated several thousand dollars of additional business. You can read that article at the link below.

   So to "The King" I say: Thank Yah, Thank Yah Vuhry Much!

   I enjoy your stuff.  Keep up the good work.

2. Comment by Los Angeles Dentist — April 3, 2008 @ 8:30 am

   Great article.

   However, there’s one caveat I would like to add regarding the Direct Mail Information Service survey you cited…  I’m always skeptical of what people SAY they do, versus what they actually do when it comes to actually pulling out their wallets to order.

   Nonetheless, some really good ideas.  Thanks!

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