8 Ways to Dramatically Increase Profits From Direct Mail (2 of 2)

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about the 8 ways to dramatically increase profits from direct mail, part 2. Last week, both Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer taught us 3 of the 8 strategies, including number 1, the who you target to, number 2, creating better margins in what is being sold, and number 3, improving the total customer value. Today, we're gonna finish part 2 by talking about the last 5 pieces that you really need to know in order to make your direct mail really sing. Amazing strategies here. Make sure you're tuned in, and if you missed the last episode, make sure to go back and check that one because this is definitely a two-parter and you don't want to miss anything. Let's get started.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Well, let's move on to our next item because I want to try to give us some time for some Q&A today as well. And our next item on our list is Making sure that your message matches the market. Gee, that's a new idea around here. So why don't we— why don't I turn that one over to Mr. Message-to-Market-Match, Dan.

I just read a book yesterday where it's proclaimed as a revolutionary new process by the author. The Marketing Triangle with Message to Market Match.

That wouldn't be a no-BS book, would it?

No, no, no. It's unfortunately not mine at all, but it's someone who has invented this new process.

Oh, great.

Well, you know, this loops back to the first thing we talked about, you know, is really tightly connecting the who that you are going to mail to to the message. Here again is where people often don't get the results they want from direct mail because they are sloppy at one end of that or the other or both. So sloppy about the selection of the who and/or sloppy about the matching of the message to the who. And so age matters a lot. Gender matters a lot. Married or single matters a lot. Own a business or work in a job matters a lot. You know, there's— we live in a very fragmented world, and so there's no such thing anymore as golfers. There's a million little subsets, and people expect to be talked to and respond when they are talked to only in their subsection. So there's a huge difference between the once-a-year golfer, the once-a-month golfer, and the once-a-week golfer. There's a huge difference between the golfer who almost always bets money on his games versus the golfer who does not bet money on his games. There's a huge difference between affluent golfer and unaffluent golfer, and on and on and on and on and on. And so everything we talked about under number 1 connects here to number 4, and your highest productivity and your greatest chances of success are always with the tightest possible combination of those two things. A very well-defined, precisely defined who and then a message very precisely matched to that who. In an information marketing example in a niche, we found now with 3 different clients that there's enormous gains to be had by separating out the practitioner who is a short number of years away from likely retirement versus the practitioner who is not yet at that point. They are both the same practitioners. They both have the same practices. They both have the same day-to-day experiences in practices, but they have a very different mindset. They think differently, as you pointed out earlier about that company that is claiming to match mindset with lists, and therefore, they need entirely different messages. If you're going to connect with them, you're going to talk to them very, very differently.

You know, and I'll give you one more item to add to the bullet list of things that matter a lot. And I really first saw this in practice in 2000. In 2000, I believe it was 2000, is when we were having our presidential election. With Bush versus Gore. No, it wasn't Bush. Yeah, it was Bush versus— yeah, yeah, Bush versus Gore. That's right. And, um, and we didn't know who was president because they couldn't add up anything in Florida, if you remember that. And I had sent out, um, we— this was in early November, and as everybody knows, uh, for my retail business, for year after year after year, we sent out the Thanksgiving greeting cards.. And everybody's mind was, who's going to be our next president? And I actually, that year, I sent out a voice broadcast message to support the direct mail of the Thanksgiving greeting card, and the voice broadcast message came out from Clinton, a Clinton impersonator. And we had a 92% increase in response that year in our already very successful promotion. Now, to be fair, a lot of it had to do with the fact that we sent out sequentially marketing, which in this case the sequence was voice broadcast. But a lot had to do with the fact that we were talking to them on what's on their mind. So one of the— a real shortcut that I often find as far as message-to-market matches is sort of enter the conversation that they're already thinking about because what's newsworthy, so to speak, so that— because it's already going to grab their attention. So that's kind of a shortcut to getting the message to market match. Can't live on it exclusively. It just becomes— you still have to have the right message to market match, but it's sort of like a booster to getting even more response to that. I guess also we could mention, Dan, that this also applies very much with this message to market match. You do a lot of work right now in marketing to the affluent in the Marketing to the Affluent newsletter that you publish, and you talk about it a lot. Again, there I think that that's another real smart place to be thinking about is the message to market match and thinking about how do you connect with the thinking of the affluent. By the way, I listened to that call you did on the boomers call and I thought that what you had reported was fascinating on that call, especially how now 60-year-olds feel about themselves. Yeah. Which is not an age that you and I are even contemplating, but—

Well, no, but— well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, even to see that people tend to categorize too broadly, you know. And so this message, like if you take the affluent, I mean, the affluent breaks up into at least a dozen different subsections that ideally are talked to very, very differently. I mean, there's sort of the millionaire next door crowd as Thomas Stanley described, you know, who basically are— would be classed as affluent but live significantly beneath their means in every category but one personal passion. And their value system is still very middle class where you have this person who might have exactly the same income and even the same net worth but is called flash affluent and is about peacock display of their status. And you really cannot sell effectively to those two people with exactly the same message. And most businesses really should think about themselves as a collection of vertical businesses under one umbrella rather than as one business.

So the next item on our list, and it's probably one that I enjoy the most in terms of being able to be creative and certainly with all the outrageous advertising I've done throughout the years, it's an area that I've really spent a lot of time on, which is the exterior of the envelope. A lot of people— and I've been preaching and teaching it for a long time— but a lot of people, they assume that when you send something to somebody, they're going to open it up and read what's inside of it., and oftentimes the battle is lost because no one ever does open it up and read inside of it. I mean, I always tell, and I do it myself, I mean, I basically look through the pile of mail next to a trash can, and if it has no interest to me, I never open it up. It just goes right into the trash can. And so thinking in terms of getting the envelope open is very important. It's critical. There's two basic strategies that are often talked about. One is the blind approach where it appears as it comes in basically a plain number 10 envelope. There is little or none return address on it, and if the return address is on it, it's kind of disguised return address where you can't tell that it's coming from any kind of a business. More looks like it's coming from a person, or in many cases just an address. And then the The address part, best case scenario is actually addressed in real handwriting. If not real handwriting, in a font that can pretty much come close to fooling you, although you never totally fool anybody with a font. But you can get close to it. Certainly you want to do it in blue ink. A real live stamp. Actually what we've learned is multiple stamps outperform one stamp. That the stamps that are the special edition stamps, like right now if there's a holiday stamp, Dean Killingbeck who does birthday mailings to cold birthdays gets stamps that say happy birthday on them. Putting stamps on crooked or upside down get an increased response. So basically fooling people to think that a friend is sending you correspondence. That's a very smart approach and that oftentimes will get your envelope open. Conversely, the other side is now when you've gone to a place where you are revealing who you are, um, you— Danny, can you still hear me? Yeah. Okay, I'm just hearing some cracking.

I'm hearing a little clicking too, but yeah, I know what it's in.

Yeah, but, um, conversely, on, on the other side of the coin, if you are, um, revealing who you are, well, now you basically want to get all the stops out, and now you want to use everything on the envelope., and in many cases do things that are kind of outrageous envelopes. So things such as sending things by FedEx is a smart thing to do. That's a smart kind of an envelope. There's the phony FedEx-y kind of things. I'm going to actually switch phones here a little bit. Can we— okay, I think you can hear me better now. There's envelopes that look like the FedEx type of things. We just, for all of our members, be on the lookout. In the next couple days, you'll be getting a UPS envelope from us that's actually been sent in the, you know, through the United States Postal Service, which is a, which in and of itself is an amazing task. And look at it, and we're actually going to reveal at the Superconference in March— actually, it's April— in April how we were able to get the United States Postal Service to send out a UPS envelope for us. And of course, you know, I'm famous for sending out some really outrageous type of things such as placemats and brown paper bags, but all that is to get through the clutter, to get people so curious or have it appear that it's so important that they just have to open it up and read what's inside. Now the last thing I want to say about this, is that when you do this, one kind of rule is important, and I consider it a fatal flaw when it's not abided by, which is that once you open it up, the inside has to be congruent with what's on the outside. So, for example, in the case of the UPS envelope that you all will be receiving shortly, on the very front cover of this, we actually call your attention to the fact that we sent it out in a UPS envelope. In the case of my diner placemat, when you see the message on the inside, it actually is a handwritten message and it refers back to the diner placemat and tells a story about why I'm sending this to you in a diner placemat. But nothing, I think, irritates the recipient more than when it, when you try to fool them on the outside, and then when you open up inside and you see it's just a blatant advertising display, brand-building type of thing that doesn't have any congruency with the outside of it.

Dan, before I move on to the next topic, anything you want to add to that? Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, the sort of, "Ah, yuck, I've been conned," reaction to the innards that don't match up with the expectation created by the outside of the envelope, you know, destroys all of the success you had in getting it opened. And it requires then an extraordinarily strong presentation beginning with the very first headline in order to overcome that "ah, yuck" reaction. And so 99.9% of the time it's to be carefully avoided. I have a client who for years at this time of year has been very effective sending out his direct mail package which leads to an appointment for a fairly big-ticket sale inside a gift-wrapped box. So that it looks like a holiday present. Well, nobody throws out a holiday present. Everybody opens a holiday present. The absence of the gift tag on the outside so nobody can tell who this one is from does not dissuade them from opening it. In fact, it probably heightens them opening it. But early on when he started to use this strategy, it wasn't working, and that's because inside the box was his sales letter. I said to him, no, The sales letter can be in there. It needs to be in there, obviously. That's the purpose of sending a box. But there better be a gift in there, too, because you created the expectation that there's a gift, so there damn well better be a gift. So that now makes the whole process work. Halbert, for years, with pure sneak-up where you've been led to believe from the outside of the envelope that it's from Aunt Mary or that it's not it doesn't contain commercial information, but you have to enclose a brochure and you have to enclose an order form. His strategy was always to put that inside a second sealed envelope so that you read the main letter or you read the card or whatever piece it was that was congruent with the outside of the envelope, and you didn't open that thing up and have coupons and brochures and order forms fall falling out all over your desk or your kitchen table. So I totally concur. I think you've got to give great care to making the immediate reaction upon opening the package match up with the expectation that got them to open it in the first place. So if you say photo enclosed, there damn well better be a photo. If you say confidential and personal, then the first thing they see better be confidential and personal.

Well, the next item on our list here is, you know, so now that we've— let's assume that we were successful in getting the envelope open. The next thing is now we've got them inside the envelope and we want to compel readership when the envelope is opened. Kind of a couple things to consider in doing that, I mean, clearly the headline, the first thing that they see and read, has to be compelling enough to get somebody to continue. The job of the headline is to do just that, which is to further along readership. So that's a very, very important place. Other areas also are using things such as grabbers. On the top of the envelope. So that's another thing that they see early on. So that grabber, in the case of the Halbert world, since Dan mentioned Halbert, he often used the $1 bill as a grabber. So he used money at the top. Lots of other grabbers that can be used, and our members have been using, I mean, I see, they send me grabbers all the time, marketing pieces with grabbers on there. Very, very smart strategy to compel readership. The other area that certainly is important is not only is all the text of what's sent to them important, but another area that's very, very important is what I call the opening sentence after the headline. So what that sentence does is very, very valuable, and I find that oftentimes people make the mistake of starting to talk about them and their business and their company in the opening sentence versus what what this will do for the recipient in the opening sentence. I teach in my Creating Copy That Sells course that one shortcut to the opening sentence is what I call the if-then theory. If you blah blah blah blah blah blah, then this will be da da da da da. It's not the best opening sentence, but it's a good formula for at least not having a bad opening sentence. And then the last thing I'll say, in terms of compelling readership, which is another area that I find many, many people make a fatal mistake on, is the whole notion of cosmetics to what is being sent to them. What cosmetics are used? The whole, Dan teaches in his No BS Sales Letter book all about the whole notion of double readership. Actually, it's not the No BS, it's the Ultimate Sales Letter book. But the whole notion of double readership and how there's some people are skimmers and just look at certain things in order to get the message. This happens a lot. So the use of smart cosmetics to move people along in order to keep the readership there. Before we move on to the next topic, Dan, anything you want to add to that?

Not compelled to. Well, nothing trumps personal interest. So we all use all sorts of gimmicks and grabbers and devices. Really what we are trying to do is buy a few moments of permission to get them interested in what it is that we have to say. And often we're having to rely on those things more than we should because we've ignored number 1 and number 4 from this list you've compiled or haven't done a very good job with it. And so by far the best thing is having number 1 and number 4 right so that you have strong personal interest. I've got a direct mail campaign I did not too long ago for a client, again in the weight loss business, and there's a generic version of the campaign that is aimed essentially at a compiled list of women, and so its message has to be generic, and therefore we're deeply concerned about all these issues of, you know, How can we get them to read the piece? Now there's a specific version of the piece only for mothers of brides-to-be with a wedding occurring sometime in the next 6 months. The headline on that is infinitely easier to write and is virtually guaranteed to get readership. Because we can speak directly to who they are, knowing who they are and knowing that event is about to occur in their lives, and speak directly to that personal interest. And so the more you're able to drill down and get to the right message-to-market match, the easier this job gets of compelling a readership. And you know, often we're really trying to trick them or cajole them or scare them or guilt them and obligate them into readership rather than compel them into readership. And whenever we can, we're best served by compelling them through personal interest.

Dan, we've got 2 more things on our list. The next one on our list I want to talk about, and then we'll move to some questions, and we ought to go through these quickly because I like to give folks an opportunity for some questions, is this whole notion of in order to increase the response to direct mail is to create urgency. So talk about that a little bit, and talk about some strategies or techniques you use to accomplish that.

Big issue, you know. It's the problem of being almost persuaded, setting it aside to take care of it later, and later never comes. The catalog industry suffers from it enormously because everybody goes through a catalog, folds down the corners of the pages of things they want to buy, and then never buys them. And so even solo direct mail has essentially the same sort of problem, and so the biggest issue here is not to underestimate the difficulty and the importance of trying to drive people to immediately move from having read what you put in front of them to action and not to create anything that actually slows down their action. The techniques, of course, are First of all, making sure that it's clear and bold and bright and big and called to their attention, not just at the end of a presentation but at the beginning of a presentation that deadlines are in play here. And then you have choices of incentive and penalty, gain or loss and potential loss, and usually You want to use all of those things. So multiple incentives often work better than single incentives. Choice of incentives often work better than single incentives. Pick any one of these 3 gifts, that sort of thing. Discounts, of course. Perhaps better payment terms. And then penalties are price increases and of course taking away bonuses and in some cases taking away even portions of a core product, service, or offer or taking it away altogether via limited supply or limited time with which to be allowed to purchase it at all. Pain of losses, you know, the horrible things that are going to happen to you if you fail to act and really all of those bases are ideally covered in the same presentation.

You know, and the analogy that I really like with this, because, you know, I came from 30 years in the retail industry and in the menswear business particularly, and we always had what we called the be-back customer. And that was the customer that would come into the store and you'd spend time with them, show them stuff, and they would say, gee, that's really interesting, I'll be back. And I mean, Maybe 3% of them came back. 97% never did. And so the analogy I would give in direct mail, it's the same thing, is that people, a lot of times people look at something and they read it and they say, gee, I'd like to buy this and I want to buy it, but I don't need to buy it at this moment. There's no reason for me to buy it at this moment, so I'll be back, and they never come back. So you really have to look at your customer as being the be-back customer, and what do you put in place? In order to make them take action right away. I mean, I hate to— probably, Dan, you're probably going to be kind of like, um, uh, wanting to wring my neck when you hear me say this, but like, for example, you know, the, the $500 early bird discount that we're giving to people to respond before December 31st, the, the 400 autographed books. So be one of the first 400 people to get the Gene Simmons book. The easy payment plan, all those things that we, I told you about before for the super conference, I mean kind of peeling back the curtain, revealing to you the fact that these are all there to create urgency because we have a limit, we have a legitimate limit amount of people that we can put into this room and we want to get people to respond quickly to take the task off of us for having to work harder to fill the room. So these things are in place and so you just sort of saw them happen to you. Let's move on to the last topic, and here I don't think we really should spend a lot of time on this at all, because to me it's clearly— it's number 8, and it clearly should be number 8, which is this whole issue of reducing the cost and controlling the cost of your direct mail, and just, Dan, quickly some strategies to do that.

Well, most small mailers spend way too much time thinking about this and way too little time thinking about the other items. I personally made a whole lot of money in direct mail in my entire life and have never once sort of conceptualized and planned a campaign or a piece and then sat down and tried to figure out how to shave some cents off of its actual production. Really big mailers where a penny or two may add up to a significant difference do need to spend some time on this. Certainly format is, you know, one answer, and again, right now in the catalog industry you see Slightly smaller page size, for example. In some cases, lighter paper. You know, I have a client right now, we just switched from glossy paper to newsprint paper for a 36-page direct mail booklet, and it matters. Certainly working with vendors that understand we're in the direct response business and we're not IBM who spends money without any thought of return on investment, not becoming too lazy and familiar with one vendor because they're easy, but actually pricing things if it is significant to you. But the biggest thing you can do you can do to control cost is actually number 1, which is doing a much better job at targeting so that the money you are spending is being spent on the highest probability prospects. And so, you know, I've often used the example and I just did a mailing. So for me, every once in a while and for many years, often the National Speakers Association was a target market of mine. Now that list encompasses NSA members and non-NSA members, but let's take the professional speaker market. I found a bias as we described earlier. My bias was that women speakers with hyphenated names were significantly inferior as customers compared to women with non-hyphenated names. And so rather than trying to figure out how to spend 3 cents less on each envelope, I get to take 400-some-odd names out of a list and not mail to them at all, and that's actually a much more effective knife for cost cutting than is actually compromising the effectiveness of the piece itself.

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