Direct Mail: A Huge Competitive Advantage In Today’s World with Joe Polish and Brian Kurtz - Genius Network Episode #118

Kind of, I think, is why the rumors of, you know, the premature rumors of direct mail being dead. Does direct mail have a place in today's electronic world? Brian Kurtz and Joe Polish believe a simple postcard or letter can totally transform your business. Remember to subscribe to Genius Network so that you don't miss a Future episode. Visit geniusnetwork.com subscribe for more.

Brian Kurtz has been a serial direct marketer for over 35 years and never met a medium he didn't like. And while he's had much, he also must admit that trying to sell subscriptions and books on the back of ATM receipts and under yogurt lids was only a good idea at the time. Brian left his beloved boardroom Inc. In 2015, where he was responsible for the mailing of close to 2 billion pieces of direct mail in his career. And he did not lick every stamp but a few. He did. And he was also responsible for the distribution of millions of other impressions and promotions in a wide variety of of alternative media, both offline and online, using the most innovative direct marketing techniques while working with the most legendary copywriters and consultants who have ever lived. His mission for the next 35 years is to be the bridge between the eternal truths of direct response marketing and all that is considered state of the art direct response marketing. Today in September of 2014, to kick off that mission, Brian hosted what has been called the event of the decade. Titan's a direct response Brian and I was there. Brian writes and speaks regularly and recent content can be found@briankurtz me and his first book, the Advertising Solution, was published in 2016. His second book, Over Delivery, will be published this year. But truth be told, Brian is really just a little league baseball umpire and does this direct marketing stuff on the side. His ultimate goal is to umpire in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania while he is still upright. And he hopes that happens soon. Give it up for my friend of over 20 years, Brian Kurtz. All right, brother.

Thank you. Thanks.

All right, so we're going to have a great conversation about direct mail, which is. Is it dead?

It's dead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's dead. So let's start with some well thought out prepared questions that I have here for you. And I'm going to do this from the assumption that how many of you in the room use direct mail currently as a form of communication and marketing to your prospective and started to how many of you have not used direct mail in your business in at least the last year? Okay, so more People are not using this medium than people that are. And I will tell you that given the choice of if I could only use one method of marketing right now, out of all the things offline, all of the very clever, sophisticated, interesting, high tech ways of selling, I would pick direct mail as my number one choice of how to sell anything. If you gave me the if I could only use offline or online marketing and the offline method was either advertising, direct mail, whatever, I would pick direct mail. That is my preferred choice.

I would be a little. The only thing I'll be careful about is that, you know, it's like making sushi. You know, I wouldn't do it at home. And so I think it's become more. It's complicated. You can lose a lot of money very quickly if you don't do it right. So I do think that. And for acquisition, we'll talk about this, but for acquisition as opposed to using direct mail on the back end. And we've talked a lot already over these last two days about all the different things that marketers do. And I want everybody to think of direct mail. It's not, it's not an or so we don't have to make that decision. Yeah, no, it's an and you know, everything that I've talked about since I've been here, but what I talk about all the time, it's like a broken record is that to not be multi channel is crazy. I mean, to be in one thing when you can get shut down is just. That's the simple reason. The other reason is that all these things can work together and direct mail just works so well. And we'll come up, I'll give you some examples of how direct mail, it doesn't have to be used for acquisition, but can be used on the back end of your campaigns. I mean, even just when Dean was talking about talking to audiences in a certain way, the idea that your VIPs on your list, if you have a high ticket product, for example, why shouldn't you be investing more in them? And direct mail is more expensive, but the engagement factors are just so much more intense. So we'll talk about all of that. But it is an and, not an or.

Well, yeah, and my first question is why and how does direct mail provide a competitive advantage? But you're kind of answering that right now. And what I would say from. I'd like you to speak to this is that there's less noise in people's mailboxes today than ever before. And so it's Just less competitive. And if you know how to do it, it gives you a huge advantage.

Yeah, that's an obvious one. That's, you know, the least crowded inbox is the one you grew up with is kind of what we talk about assuming you're definitely. If you're my age, you definitely grew up with something at the end of your driveway. Sometimes I'm with like 20 year olds and I always have to ask them if they know what a mailbox is, do they know where it is? And it's funny, they all check their mail and they all still like their mail. So this idea that, yes, it works much better with an older audience for the most part. But ask a 20 year old, if they go out to their mailbox and pull out a big jiffy bag with all kinds of stuff in it that they don't, and it's hand addressed with. And then they went off their email to go out to the mailbox, they're gonna open that bag before they go back to their computer in the house, is what is the question I asked them. So just because they're young doesn't mean they're not gonna respond to direct mail.

Well, and there's a couple young people that I have interviewed, done podcasts with Connor Blakely and Mark Lack, and both of them mostly Mark, because he sends me direct mail pieces a lot. He literally get. I don't know if he heard me give my whole thing about send 10 postcards to someone every day. And if you do that for like a year, your entire network and your life will change. Be it thank yous or whatever, if you just simply sent a handwritten or real physical letter or postcard, if you just. Because no one does that.

Right?

And a lot of young people try to reach out to me, but they're trying to reach out to me through social media. They're trying to reach out to me through email. And when it's.

It's a differentiator, you know, the. I've spoken a lot to college students and they're coming out of college and they're looking for jobs. So I always ask one of the same questions. I say, after you do an interview, how many of you send an email follow up to the person that you interview with? And of course they all raise their hand. I said, how many of you? And then I always have like a piece of paper with a paperclip. I go, this is a piece of paper and this would be called a paperclip. And how many of you would actually send a handwritten note or a typewritten letter.

And.

And the 30% who raised their hand are lying. You know, they just assume that's not the way to follow up. And I said, how many of you, if you were talking in the interview with the interviewer about a particular person that you both admire or somebody that would be someone you follow who relate to the job that you're going for, that you would send an article that I read this article here's. And they're looking at me like, wow, that would be a lot of work. I mean, I just sent an email and I just said, thank you for the interview. And. And I just said, you know, I just went to the microphone and I whispered into the microphone loud. You know, you will be different than anybody else. You know, so the differentiation at the college student level, it's the same issue that we talk about here. And anybody who doesn't think that sending 10 Federal Express envelopes to your 10 best customers, as Dan Sullivan always says, you know, 10 people who write you your biggest checks, and you sent them all in a Federal Express envelope, I'm telling you have a big list. But even you take your 10 best people and you have a book or you have something you want to send them with a personalized note, what are the odds they're going to open a Federal Express envelope? And you know what the lifetime value is of those customers already. So it's not like you're wasting the postage and the printing. You are actually investing in your best people with a medium that's about total engagement. Email is the killer app. I'm not saying that it's not, but if you can start using especially direct mail on the back end of any kind of campaign that you're doing and start thinking about creative ways to do it. And direct mail doesn't have to be in the millions. It can be in the dozens. And so that's what I think. People just. It's a lost art to send, to be creative and to differentiate yourself. And I have this thing you talk about, the 10 postcards. I mean, I have this thing, I called it my daily endorphin rush. So my daily endorphin, my desk is set up here, and I have this table where my assistant comes when she has to go. I don't want to go to the post office and mail this stuff. So. But at least three or four times a day, I make sure that I have some package that I'm sending to somebody, a book, a note, something. And I actually. The art of walking around my desk and putting it onto the table, even though it's not going out for a few days. Total endorphin rush for me. It's total contribution, total giving, all of that. But plus it's really good for business. And sometimes they actually pay me for what I'm putting in that package, which is even better. But this is about a long term. And why does direct mail have. It's all about engagement. How many people have gotten a direct mail package? They're not even sure it's a promotion like a bookalog or a magalog, all the formats that we use, and you put it on your nightstand for a week. I mean, it's actually. You can actually put value in. I mean, Jason and I talk a lot about sizzle and steak, right? In the days of, you know, in the olden days, in, you know, prehistoric era, you never gave away any stake in your direct mail package. That's changed. With so much content marketing online, you've got to adapt. So the best direct mail I've seen recently over the last few years, and we did it at Boardroom, we did a lot of magalogs where we actually gave away some of the secrets. It was like the six things you need to know when you're going to the chiropractor and. And you give them three. And to get the other two, you gotta buy the book. But I gave you the three 15, 20 years ago. You wouldn't even give away the three. So those are the kinds of ways that you combat the notion that content marketing is so prevalent online. It's so cheap to deliver content online. I get that we're competing against that if you're doing direct mail, but you can use all the things that we're learning online and develop them offline. And then the engagement's gonna be so much better. Give you one more stat that's really important to know. I've not met yet any online marketer who does any direct mail in their business that tracks lifetime value of a customer from beginning to whatever period of time they stay with them, that if the original order originated in direct mail, the lifetime value of that customer is way higher than anybody who originates in any online medium, even email. But the idea that I love is I call it O2O2O, which is online to offline or online. You want to mix and match and meet the customer where they want to be met. Some people on your list will never want to be met in direct mail, and that's okay, but why not meet them there? You said getting Getting. When you got the postal addresses, I don't care if they change their email addresses postal. You can actually use something called ncoa. You can actually get the post office to change the address for you and get it delivered. How about that? They charge you for it. Reasonably. U.S. postal Service, it's a monopoly, but it's a good one. They actually do pretty well. So there's so much that I think that this engagement and making sure that if you can engage them in direct mail and then get them. And I don't really love the word funnel, because we've been doing that stuff forever. I mean, funnels are an easy, convenient way. But back at moving people through something from a direct mail piece. And now we can get their email address and get them online. And if they want digital content, we'll deliver that. But then when they start spending thousands of dollars with us, why wouldn't I want to go back to direct mail with something of higher value? I mean, if you. You gotta calculate. And so lifetime value is one of the other big areas that direct mail worked in. I will tell you this, though. So here's the whole caveat. You know, why do people think direct mail is dead? People think direct mail is dead. And I can tell you, at Boardroom in our height, we were probably mailing. Michael probably knows. We were probably mailing, what, 120 million names a year easy. And Michael was doing a lot of the work for me on that. But when I left boardroom in 2015, we were mailing about 30 million. Now, that's really good list. These are response lists. So the response list universe and everybody know the difference between a compiled list and response list. Okay, So a response list is a list where someone actually responded in the mail before.

And.

And that's, of course, more expensive. Those are the best lists. They're much harder to get. And when I was selling subscriptions and books, I just wanted response lists, a compiled list, which everybody can get. Like in the real estate business, you would get compiled lists if you're selling in a region, or it's basically the phone book with demographic data lapped onto it, or psychographic data. It doesn't mean that they're going to respond, but at least you can mail them because you have their address. That's the big difference. So response list universes have gone down so far that that's what kind of, I think, is why the rumors of, you know, the premature rumors of direct mail being dead. Because if you're mailing for subscriptions, for example, like we did you know, when you're mailing 120 million a year, now you're only mailing 30 or 40 million. You gotta find other channels. Cause you're not gonna be able to have. Cause direct mail was the channel for us for a long time. So that's where I think a lot of the debt. I will tell you this too. Even when we were down at 40 million instead of 120 or whatever we were, the response rates were as good or better. When I left Boardroom, I don't know what they. I'm sure they still are. So in 2015, the response rates that we got to broad based direct mail for subscription and book offers were as good or better than they were back in 2000. In the 1990s, you can do it, but it's all about the best offer. It's all about the. And the list segmentation, it's another big advantage. I mean the list segmentation. I told Dean at the break when we talked about, I talked about the expires being your best list. And you said, you know, 90 days and people are giving up on people. Those expires that we were mailing, you know, we want you back. We had a five year old expire list because we kept on, we were updating their addresses. We would actually get new people to come back with a we want you back. Five years old, six years old. Don't tell me about dead names. So direct mail does have these advantages. Again, not to replace, but you've got all these advantages. And if you've got a really good story to tell and you hire great copywriters and you can tell that story, what a great opportunity. I mean it's not a quite. You can engage them in a whole different way. So those are some of the big advantages besides the emptier mailboxes. Right.

Okay, good. So what are some of the ways that USPS can be all the people in here, in the room, their most valuable partner?

You know, so one of the, one of the jobs I had at Boardroom was I was the one that went down to Washington D.C. and lobbied for postal reform, which was fascinating because you know, the Postal Service struggles because it's a monopoly and yet they don't get certain funding for their employees. And we've got to keep the U.S. postal Service in business. We, you know, it's such an, it's such an important part of our lives. So what I would go down and I'd lobby for the government's taking care of a lot of other government agencies. Why aren't they taking care of this monopoly? And the fun thing there was that I used to go down and I work for this company, Boardroom. How many people here have even heard of Boardroom? Probably not everybody, by any means. And so I'm in the meeting with National Geographic. You heard of them, right? Aarp. Sure you've heard of them. And I'm sitting there and say, who's this pisher from Boardroom? Who's this kid? And so, you know, we were spending $22 million a year on postage. And I loved it. I love paying for postage. I always say that. You know, I think I have a chapter in my new book. It's how paying postage made me a better marketer. Because it's the kind of thing that we were talking about before that. Why wouldn't you want to take the care and concern for every single message that goes out? I don't care how cheap it is. So we had no choice. I was paying through the nose because I had to pay for all that stuff. So you know how careful we were with our best copywriters, best list selection, making sure there was no wasted circulation. If you looked at your email like that, at least philosophically, how much better would your emails be? Think about it. So that. So the post office, the US Postal Service, I mean, it's still the best in the world. You know, I ship a lot of books all over the world. Physical product. I still ship a lot of physical product. And I republished a great book by Gene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising. And his wife, she's 83. She can't believe I'm shipping books to Singapore. That people know who Gene Schwartz even is. And it's like the greatest book ever written on copy and creative. And so I look at how long it takes to get delivered to all these countries and the U.S. postal Service, it's still like, you still get your stuff for the most part, in three or four days.

Yeah, yeah, they have.

Send a card to your mom. I mean, it's getting there pretty fast.

They're one of the largest employers in the United States. They have hundreds of thousands of carriers. They will still deliver mail to the most remote homes in the US And Alaska, they'll deliver mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon via mule train.

But that's why we have to. I think that's why keeping them. We're not going to do direct mail as great marketers to keep the USPS in business. That's not the only reason. But we want to keep the USPS in business because of this incredible service. And as marketers, we're just, we love this. That they're this good is going to make us so much better. So, yeah, it's important. The USPS is definitely important to partner with, I think.

Yeah. And I mean, I would teach so many carpet cleaners how to actually mail. I mean, I can't imagine how much money has been spent on USPS just teaching my cleaners how to mail a physical monthly client newsletter. And if you were to take like a dollar a month to mail, you know, just four pages, it could be just a simple four page letter. And I would teach carpet cleaners, you know, look at their lifetime value. Say you had, you know, $120 was the profit you would make on a cleaning the carpet of one client. Well, you can mail a newsletter every single month for literally, you know, 12 years before. And all they need to do is buy from you one time in the 12 year period in order for it to be. It's one of those things that once you know the numbers, it cannot not be profitable in the proper application.

Right. And you've also differentiate, what are you going to put in that newsletter? Hopefully decent content.

Yeah, yeah.

So then if you actually have good content in there. I was talking to Peter about this. You have a newsletter and it's a differentiator in markets like real estate and financial services. And I see it even in the online marketing space. There's a few guys and gals who are doing print newsletters as a value add to everything else they do online. And I know that's getting open when that shows up in the mailbox. And it's good extra, it's additional content. It's not the same stuff they're doing online.

So you see the culture wall behind us here. If you have a question, just raise your hand. We'll get a mic to you. See all the culture wall that you see back here, what I'm going to start doing, and I wanted to wait until now so you're aware of it. I'm going to start mailing the culture walls to all of you like monthly. You'll get like a postcard, it might be in a letter, it might be sort of that. And sometimes there will be commentary, sometimes it'll just be wall art. But we're going to drip on you. And I want you to realize how you experience just getting it in the mail. And if you have a culture wall or if you have something like gaping void as an example, do pieces like this for you where you can just drip on your clients as constant reminders, like Jim and Mimi. I know you have similar things at your office where it now becomes a communication and an engagement mechanism. So, Eunice, I think the first one we should mail should be ELF because if you do direct mail. Right. It becomes easy, lucrative, and fun. The most effective salespeople that I've ever hired in my company were ones that I put on letters, stuck them inside envelopes, attach a stamp, send it out, and it would literally, they would be out there doing more effective selling for me than anyone that I would ever hire. And so to me, it's like putting a salesperson in an envelope, and then the USPS is the one that delivers the letter. Well, the one thing that we've noticed is that you can take your highest value clients and mail them all this other stuff that maybe lower value clients or prospects that haven't moved on are getting only digitally and that the higher.

Value meaning, like, better customers. Better. Wow.

Yeah, I know, right? No, but it's, you know, if you put it on, you know, in a process.

Absolutely. Oh, it's a funnel.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's get a microphone, too.

Trust me, I know by now.

Right.

So, Brian, Joe wants to sell how many spots to the annual event this year? 450.

Yeah. Yeah. By August 15th, I want to have it sold out.

Okay.

So we were strategizing on how to do this, and I said to Joe, you remember this, Joe?

Well, keep going and I'll probably remember. Yeah, I mean, we've spent a lot of time strategizing.

Well, yeah, that's true.

Because Joe was like, how do we fill this up? I said, let's take. I said, how long has the annual event been since you started doing them? Eight years.

Yeah, I think when we did the first one, we started really taking it seriously. 2012.

So my suggestion, Brian, of strategy, because I was watching these guys make it way too complicated. I said, give me every name in the last eight years from this started of who's applied and. Or who's attended prior the annual event. And I said, I will write a sales letter in the mail for these people and we'll mail all of those saying, you get first dibs on these 450 spots, essentially after I write some copy or whatever. Right. That's going to be. My strategy, is to go to the direct mailbox for these types of customers. Do you have any advice or any tips on how we could best maximize this?

Yeah, I mean, I certainly. I mean, I would certainly make sure you got updated addresses so if they go back eight years, you want to ncoa them, make sure that's national change of address. Make sure that they're gonna be deliverable. And I would make it. It's not gonna. We're not talking about thousands here, right? I mean, we're talking about hundreds.

Maybe a thousand.

Maybe a thousand. So, you know, Joe's rich. So let's send.

He's paying for the whole thing.

He's paying for it. Or if he's paying for it, I can come up with some more expensive ideas.

Here's what he told me. He goes, I'll let you do that and I won't even charge you for the privilege of writing a sales letter.

There you go. What a deal. What a guy.

So I'm putting my sweat equity in and Joe's putting in the actual equity.

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's good. But I go right to something three dimensional. Dare to dream. You know, for 1,000 packages, maybe they go out FedEx or maybe they go out. I shouldn't say FedEx. I would say two day priority mail. I'd use the US Postal Service as opposed to FedEx. But if you want to do that, like a two day priority mail, it's gonna get open. And I think Joe's got some content. I don't know. Rumor has it there's some content that's been developed over the last 20 years of Joe understanding. Direct response. I don't know. It's a rumor. I haven't confirmed it. So let's put together a package of incredible useful content. So even if they. It's sort of like giving them some of the steak, right? But the sizzle is like, now you're gonna see how these things and try to pick. We'll pick stuff. I would pick stuff that might relate to some of the people who are coming to this one and why it's going to be updated. For example, maybe we send. It's a figurative example. Let's say Peter Diamandis is speaking and he's got a new book that he's going to launch. He sends everybody the last book or something like that. So there's a lot of. So you're working them in. It's like you've missed a lot. And you also want to say, we want you back. I mean, we want to have a real. I'll leave it to you to write the copy. You'll write better copy than I could.

Yeah, I got the hooks and stuff. But I do like the idea of actually giving them content in addition to this.

Oh, totally. This is not like, this is not a number 10 envelope with, you know, an order form and. Yeah, no, this is a this. And the Genius network to me is that's a story to tell. And by the way, I think it costs like $10,000. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

So, yeah, I mean, and by the way, it's a high ticket item.

We've dialed in the take rate from 10,000 to go to 25,000. Not VAN.

You got to work that into the.

Lifetime that's so dialed in. It's like a 50 to 60% you.

Can afford to make. I would say don't be a cheapskate with, you know, don't just throw shit into the package for the sake.

Yeah, we'll be deliberate and strategic.

It's got to be strategic. It's got to be congruent. It's, you know, it can't be just a mishmash of stuff. But I think, I think, I think it should be a content driven, you know, you're. You're part of our family. I mean, go back to the Starbucks story. Those people, if they've been to an event even eight years ago, that's a hot prospect for me. If you do this right, theoretically, 250.

Best quotes can we give it to? Thank you, Jay. And give it to Dean.

I always say to people, you talked about this service and you think about what other country in the world can you hire a uniformed government employee to deliver something right to somebody's door and require their signature to get it? Absolute 100% certainty of delivery. Right. But when you look at it, part of the thing that people make with direct mail, one of the mistakes they make is doing exactly the same thing they do with email, thinking that it's a mass mailing. There's no such thing as a mass mailing to one person. Right. I think if you can capture that same thing, if you think that you've got a message so important to people that you're hiring a uniformed government employee to deliver it right to their door, what would you say? And the other thing is to imagine what would you do if you walked up to their doorbell and you rang the doorbell and you actually were delivering the message to in person? Because that's really what we're doing with direct mail is where it's, you know, salesmanship in print, salesmanship multiplied. It's the same thing.

Right.

You've got to get the message right. Of what would you say if you showed up on their doorstep delivering that One message and all you're doing is that you're sending the letter in lieu of you. That's what you're using the postal service for.

What a great. So I spent most of I saw at the time Titans event. I remember Paris Andropoulos, my good friend copywriter titled our thing it's like set because it was about boardroom's history. And it said selling $2 billion worth of product $39 at a time, meaning that we really were in a $39 business. This B2B thing is really cool. I'm really enjoying it these last three years that you can sell something for $20,000 and it's a lot faster to get there. But that doesn't mean that we were half assed with the $39 mail. Boardroom mail is famous because we hired the best copywriters. We had the best copy, we had the best list selection people. We had the best people working on our offers internally in marketing. So now think about this. Now you're talking about a $10,000. I mean to me a $10,000 offer to deserves $100,000 kind of thinking. Whereas I couldn't even do that with a $39 offer. At some point I couldn't start sending books to people for a $39 book. It just wasn't going to work. But I think that this idea and I just love the idea of take but all these principles that we use, mailing 100 million names and more a year for $39 product, they all apply to mailing 1,000 people for a $10,000 offer or eight people who you want to now as a financial planner that you'd like to get them to give you another million dollars in investment. House lists are always the most valuable.

We got to give him a mic.

Yeah. So what he said was, he said this is your house list. I told you the difference between response lists and compiled lists. The idea of house lists and house list and outside list is everything. And one of the beauties of direct mail and a big advantage is that if you can go to response lists that had already responded to you before, there's so much more that you can dive deep. And if you only have one product, shame on you. One of the classic direct marketing rules of thumb is no direct marketing business can survive without repeat business. Well, I think funnel guys have figured that out, which is great, but it's been around forever. You got to have a second, third, fourth product in line and that's how you get to the lifetime value. And you just like going deeper with your House list and deeper with your house list. And if you can go to outside lists, great. You want to bring in new blood. But that's a lot. That's a different. And it's a different messaging, too. To the outside list, too. I totally agree. For the Genius Network thing, I don't think. What Talking about outside versus House. I just wanted to get that point.

Yeah. And I was planning a sequential mailing, so not just one piece, but three pieces.

If he's paying, I definitely go like six or seven.

Six or seven?

No, I'm joking, but I like the idea of multiple mailings. You got a $10,000 ticket.

And what we're going to do with some of the mailings in the sequences. Some of what we'll do in the sequences is we'll actually invite them onto a webinar, too.

I mean, I wasn't planning on doing that, actually.

Well, I was planning on doing.

No, but I mean, when you, you.

Know, not putting you on a webinar.

Come on, you got a $10,000 ticket with some exponential number above that in lifetime value. Knowing how many people convert to becoming Genius Network. I mean, this will be a great case history of how we use direct mail to fill up a room with lists that are eight years old. That would be a really cool case history. And it's going to work. If you do it right, it's going to work. Make sure we clean the list. I mean, I can help. So if you want to show you.

The piece that I write, would you help me with it?

I would love to do that.

Thank you.

I do it more for you than I do it for you.

Oh, of course.

Right.

No, I appreciate that. No, I'm a loyal member. I'd love to be involved.

All right, cool. I'll connect with you on that.

I love that.

What's in this for me, though? I mean, you guys. You guys pay to be here. You're gonna write all my copy and all this.

I'm trying to figure out what I want. I think I want this case history because I am obsessed with the O2 OTA O case history thing. I have a client already that was 100% digital content. They had created physical content. And we did a direct mail campaign for these guys. And again, the lists were smaller. These were health lists. This is, like, my sweet spot. We got. Michael's going to. You're going to be impressed. 6 and 7% response rates. Front end on a book offer. On a physical product, $49 offer. That's double what would be considered to be excellent, Right. Michael's double what it would be considered. So those are the kind of response rates you can get today. Smaller lists, but it's out there. You know why? Mailbox is empty. You're committed to great creative, you're committed to list segmentation. You're committed to all the fundamentals you're going to. It's like how Joe got all the carpet cleaners that work with Joe. If you work with Joe, you were going to be a really successful carpet cleaner. If you didn't work with Joe, you'd be a way less successful carpet cleaner.

Why?

Direct response.

Yeah. And I'll tell you to this day, in terms of the cleaning clients, the highest earning one truck operation in the world. Client of mine, the largest privately held contract cleaning company in the world. Client of mine all over the world. The very best in that category were all members of my company.

Yeah. One thing I want to comment because I'm a BG Internet marketer before Google and so that puts me in the.

Dinosaur you got so young.

I don't know. Yeah. 1995. The Internet Marketers are not in the math business. Like direct mail. Direct mail. They're purely in the math business. So it's not a $10,000 sale. In fact, I'm glad Jason said that because we have a proven three step model, the sale. We have our back end dialed in now.

Right.

And I'm part of it. So it's 10 plus an additional 40 to 50% with an additional 15K. Right. So you're looking at annual value and then there's also the lifetime value. But where the Internet marketers miss is not that email's dead. They never tried it. Unless you're the hardcore Ryan Deiss or the Russell Brunson who come from the Kennedy crowd. And they use different channels. But here's the thing, one thing that Dice taught me and it's annoying because he used to be a student, now he's a mentor. And he says it's not about B2B or B2C. It's H to H. And you know, that's what Dean's been talking about. It's H to H. So sending a small envelope with a card with an appearing, you know, handwritten by Joe, saying something is coming and then the sequence has something else coming in. Just pure curiosity piece. The lift is mind boggling. And the CTA is an application.

Exactly.

That's the other thing. It's not even a 10k sale.

We did three wave surveys. We used to call them Q tests, questionnaire test. And we used to be able to mail 2,000 former buyers. 2,000 former buyers. We'd send them a postcard to say the survey's coming. Survey came with a $2 bill and then a letter afterwards saying, did you fill out your survey? But these are people who are on our list. They were house people. They had paid money with us. We segmented these 2,050% response rate. 5, 0. And now I knew exactly what my product was going to be next. That's why we never launched this old direct mail. We never. Michael knows this. We never launched a book at Boardroom unsuccessfully. Some were much better than others, but we used that system. A three. Jason left. But yeah, that's why a three tier can work. But that. And again, if you do an email reminder in this mix, it bumps it even more.

The thing is, with drip with direct mail and anyone's watching it, it's not the same as email drip because there is no delete key. They have to physically hold it. Even if it doesn't make a pile, they're still touching it.

Tactile makes a difference. Really does.

Yep. There's theater and there's the physical thing. You just cannot replicate that in even with the most insane video editing, you cannot replicate what you can do with a physical piece. And also email as an example, or Facebook or any of the online methods. It's the ultimate form of multitasking. Because whenever you're looking at something, you're looking at all kinds of different decisions. But when someone holds a singular communication, they're just dealing with that one piece.

Can I do. I want to do a couple of. Just really quick. So Dick Benson, who was like the guru of direct mail, he wrote a book called Secrets of successful Direct Mail. I have the rights to the book. I have to figure out if I want to reprint it or not. And in the front of that book. And he did all of his marketing. Forget Google. I mean I'm talking about before Internet completely. And Dick in his book. And I think we can get this to everybody. I don't know if I'll get it to you. I'll get it to Eunice and you can give it out the 31 rules of thumb that I sent. So at the beginning of Benson's book, it's 31 rules of thumb of direct mail. Let me just read a couple to you and you tell me if these don't apply to online marketing. So number one says a two time buyer is twice as likely to buy as A one time buyer. Most of the experts I know who issue catalogs, handle circulation publications or raise funds by mail know this to be true. The same know this to be true. So I wrote to myself here, if you don't, you need to understand rfm. Anybody know what RFM is? Anybody not know? So RFM is recency, frequency, monetary value. That's how every single list was selected in direct mail. It's still how every list is selected and modeled in direct mail. Do you know that if you took anything that you've done with any list that you have and did even rudimentary recency, how recently they responded, how frequently they responded and how much they spent with you combine those characteristics. The names that are going to rise to the top are the ones that are the combination of that. I did it over tens, hundreds of millions of names with, with a statistician. I was an English major, I didn't do any of it, but I had a statistician doing that for me. And you can do that with 100 name list. You can go in and find all those. So that was one of his rules of thumb. Another one is a creditor bill me offer will improve results by 50% or more. Why is there no Internet marketer that wants to start getting bold about offering some kind of a real bill me offer? There aren't that many out there. You know, everything's got to be credit card or cash up front. But there's going to be a way and this is one of my missions because we could do credit screening in direct mail. Like you could actually give somebody a book. I could give somebody a big book for free, not get any money from them, put a bill on it and get a 70% payout. Because of the selection I did of lists and the creative I was using, that's mind boggling. Any online marketer I tell to that they go, you're crazy, you're crazy. 70% payout and a 4 or 5% front end response rate. So that's like an incredible advantage. I'll do just a couple more. You can never sell two things at once. Dick Benson said about direct mail. How many online marketers are trying to do so much in that offer that you're so confused they have no 5, right. And so the thing that you want to learn here about selling two things at once and what we can learn from our ancestors like Dick Benson is that you want to be able to do what we call single variable testing. Most online marketers don't have the discipline for that. And What I mean by that is if you're going to, I mean you know, if you're going to change a price, you only change the price and everything stays the same. So you know, if it's the price that was the thing that won or lost. But you need to do that with almost every variable and online you can do it so quickly. And so the irony is you can make single variable tests that are really statistically significant and. And yet no one wants to do it because it's much more quick fix. Now I don't want to say no one. I know I hang out, I try to hang out with the online marketers who get things like RFM and lifetime value and even understanding what I. Another one is rules of thumb is that the list is the most important thing of lists offer and copy. There's a thing called the 40 40, 20 rule. This was from direct mail that the success of any direct mail campaign 40% was due to the list. 40% the offer, 20% to the creative. I know our copywriters don't like to hear that. That doesn't mean that the creative is half as important. What that says is, is that if you have creative that is like the best, you hire the best copywriter you can find and it goes to a list that is not interested in your product. You're going to get zero sales. However, you have a really good list or an affiliate mails for you and you got the worst possible creative you ever did with. With a mediocre offer. I'll guarantee you'll make some money. Now imagine putting all those three things together. But what Dick told me that the list is the most important. So now I call it the 413920 rule. So make sure that we're paying attention to our list first and your audience. You get that dialed in, you get the offer dialed in. Then you hire the copywriter. That's the order it's gotta go. And the copywriter becomes your partner. That's a whole nother subject altogether. But those are direct mail rules of thumb that all should be applied all the time to everything that we do online. And the people that I work with as either clients or in my mastermind groups. That's kind of the way we look at it. And I got some great online marketers in there. Some of them do direct mail. Tell Richard Rossi direct mail's dead. Richard Rossi's filling 10,000 seat stadiums of high achieving students and their parents 100% through direct mail. I don't know, that's pretty good. Endorsement right there. So anyway, so there were a lot of. There's a lot of like rules of thumb that are. Oh, there it is right there. Oh, you know, it's not that many. Yeah, maybe, but he does waves, so. But I think the like the whole list that he can go to is only like 120, 150,000. And it's compiled lists. It's a little more than that. Yeah. Okay, but I mean, but it's all a compiled list of students that have a 3, 6 cum or whatever. So he's limited. It's a compelling offer, though. It's a compelling offer.

Cool. Do you have a question? Do you say anything you want to say?

Yeah, go ahead.

And then what?

I know we have to wrap up, so.

Sorry, I just have to say I loved it when the recession hit and the mailbox is emptied, but then the email box filled up, so just kind of evened out. One of the most compelling direct mail things I ever saw was a financial planner that sent out I think was like $500 bills in a Tiffany box. And it was like, wow. And I was a person who used to fill out those surveys because if they gave me five dollars, I felt guilty. I'm like, depression. My parents were depression era. Right. But that $500, I was like, that is really nice. And I just tucked it away and I never called back, never followed her.

You must have been on a list of a high ticket ticket buyer in the past.

I guess, you know, so that's the question is how do you find the right list? So I did. I mean, she called me a few times and I wasn't interested. Wasn't.

Well, first off, the right list is always your existing clients, right?

Yeah.

Jason said house list, outside list. Your house list is your gold mine.

Right?

That's your gold mine.

Right.

Because they've already invested, you know who they are.

And then you can, you know, have email baristas and deep direct mail baristas.

Yeah. So what I would do with the carpet cleaners is for one, their own list. People that have done business with them before. And then one of the ways that I would get them to create a cash flow surge where I could always add six figures to a car, you know, and now you gotta understand carpet cleaning, not selling high ticket items, having to go and provide a physical service, not sophisticated. And you know, most of them are not going and getting like high level degrees and stuff to cleaning carpets. Most of it is an accidental industry. And I taught tons of service businesses because in the late 90s I'd license my marketing courses to home remodelers, heating, air conditioning, printing, painting, jewelry, florists, hair and nail salons, pest control, auto sales. And so lots of service businesses. Right. And what I would do is I'd say, okay, you know, who already has an existing relationship with someone that they, you know, that know, likes and trusts them. And so a dry cleaner of clothing, an interior designer, a real estate agent, you know, any other service businesses. And so I would get the carpet cleaners to have endorsement letters that were recommending that carpet cleaner service business.

Make it sound like grandpa, but, you know, Internet marketers didn't invent affiliate marketing, just FYI. Go ahead, keep going.

Well, and it's funny because Seth Godin, you know, in the later 90s, wrote permission marketing, but we were doing that shit, you know, exactly. You know, way back when do you.

Think AARP was selling magazines or insurance? I mean, you know, and they weren't delivering the insurance, they were partnering with an affiliate.

Right, right. And so what I would.

In 1960.

Go ahead.

No, you can immediately get other lists just simply by doing endorsed mailings. And there's. So if you learn how to do direct mail effectively to your own list, that's great. If you can do it to other lists and, you know, other people that have lists that never do direct mail. Think of the advantages of that to get other people. I mean, we even had things. Why is a carpet cleaner sending you a letter about. I mean, why is a chiropractor sending you a letter about a carpet cleaner? That would be one of the headlines. And they would get their chiropractor to actually mail all the chiropractors clients, a free room of carpet cleaning up to 200 square feet, where no cost or obligation of any kind, and do a carpet audit instead of doing a free code or an estimate, they go in and they do. It's a process I invented because, called a carpet audit, where they would go in and they would evaluate so I would not only have an irresistible offer, and I would teach the carpet cleaners how to make more money giving away a free room of carpet cleaning. Far more effective than they ever could price, discounting their services. So here I had all these cleaners, and to this day, to this day, I mean, all over the world, carpet cleaning is still being sold using my consumer awareness guide, using my. I mean, I have thousands of carpet cleaners that still use all of my methodologies and stuff. They've been doing it for years. And so it's just, you know, you Can. It's like, where do you get a list? Who do you know that has a list that would endorse you, that would recommend you, and how can you incentivize them for doing it? Like, so for dry cleaners to clothing, one of the first things that I did when I was a Devereaux carpet cleaner, just learning how to do this now I had to learn marketing by studying direct mail people. And when you have to figure out how to make a pitch by mailing a letter to someone that you've never talked to, you're never going to talk to, you have to put a stamp on it. You have to put money in that and then compel them to call you and say, I want to hire you or to send you money. I mean, you learn how to communicate effectively. So I wanted to get this dry cleaner of clothing to actually. Because I was sitting there thinking, okay, you know, here's a particular neighborhood professionals that would bring their clothes in to get, you know, get them dry cleaned. What if I could get the. So this guy, Elegant Cleaners, which is honestly not too far down the street from here, because that's when I lived in Chandler. And so I went, what? I was like, well, how do I just be able to ask this guy? So I brought clothes into the store and. And, like, became a customer and, you know, dropped off a couple of shirts, and then I started using. Oh, wow, where's that coming from?

That guy. That guy's an idiot. Whoever's not talking sounds like my voice.

Okay, good. Now there's a mic under this. I wanted to give. All right, so those of you watching at home, we have people watching. Brian.

I just heard my voice. It's like, what is that guy talking about?

So what I did was I, you know, I said I would like to clean, but I was using this free room of carpet cleaning was the offer. So I already knew what the offer was, and the offer worked. So who else could I get to mail that offer to other people? You know, if you have a winning formula, who else could you get that winning, you know, that recipe in front of? So I use the same offer of doing a free room of carpet cleaning in order to get joint ventures. So I offered the dry cleaner. I said, I would like to clean your store or your house for free so you can see the level of service that I do. And if you like it, then I'd like to talk to you about recommending my services to your clients as a service. And I'll give you a 10% commission for every one that you recommend. So to you, you found money. Would you like to have your store or your home cleaned? So he had me clean the front area of his dry cleaning thing. And I used Robert Cialdini principle of influence, which is reciprocity. So once I cleaned the thing, I'm like, okay. Well, I go. But he was still skeptical of, like, I don't know if I want to recommend how you get. I go, do you have a list of people that used to bring their clothes to you to. To get dry clean but haven't dropped anything off in at least six months? And he's like, yeah. I go, give me the names of past customers that aren't currently doing business with you. So he literally had their addresses and phone numbers. And so what I originally did was I started off calling them, and so I would call them up and say, hello, this is Joe Polish with Fiber Care, which is the name of my company, and you're a past client of Elegant Cleaners. And what I'd like to do is let you know that we're now recommending professional carpet and upholstery cleaning services. And we'd like to, because you're a client, like to offer you one free room of cleaning up to 200 square feet, no cost or obligation of any kind. And when we come there, we'll also give you a carpet audit where we'll evaluate the condition of the rest of your carpet. And if you decide to get any additional cleaning done, it comes with 100% money back guarantee, no cost or obligation of any kind. When would you like to schedule your free cleaning? And I mean, that was literally the pitch. During the busy season, like, you know, in winter and stuff. 9 out of 10 people that I talked to and I made these phone calls myself, because this is.

No one was doing it, right?

No, no, no, no. I mean, now I got thousands of people to do it after I learned it, but I first had to learn the formula. And so nine out of 10 people would schedule a free cleaning. What's funny, in summer, where it's super hot in Arizona, not the time. 1 out of 10, it was such a difference between. But it still worked because those are still great conversions. And what ended up happening is I'd go to the home, we would clean their carpets, we'd do a free room, and then because of reciprocity, people would then do other additional cleaning. And then what would happen is I would say, okay, you know, if you're happy with the cleaning, please, you know, go back to Elegant Cleaners. And let them know, you know, what you thought of the cleaning. So he, it resurrected business for him. So all of a sudden, these cleaning jobs, they started going and having their. They started dropping off their dry cleaning again because the freaking carpet cleaner me, you know, figured out a methodology. And so in 18 months, I literally sent this guy 20. I gave him $25,000. You know, it's, it's like, I'm sorry, 25,000. I did $25,000 in business off that joint venture. I gave him $2,500. And so he made $2,500. I did $25,000 in business. And what I figured is, okay, well, I got to write a letter instead of just like calling, because eventually I called for a bit, then I got someone to do the phone calls for me. And so we ended up writing a letter. How to get a free room of. You've won one free room of carpet cleaning for being a client of Elegant Cleaners. And then I had him put posters on the wall that I just simply went down to Kinko's and had put on poster board and it said, ask us about our free carpet cleaning exclusively for clients of Elegant Cleaners. And then when they would go into the store, I then have one of those plastic bins and we had the letters there. So when you have people working at the front desk instead of, you know, they would just simply, you know, people would say, what's this free carpet cleaning? They would point to a thing, people would take it. And that's how I ended up generating business and ended up becoming this great relationship. Then I started doing it with interior designers, carpet retailers. And I, I literally went from my business was grossing 2,300amonth when I was broke. And in a six month period, I went to over 12,300amonth in revenue. And it was simply just changing the message on the paper. It was using these marketing techniques. And I blew up that business and it all became a direct mail thing though, because at first it was all manual marketing, but then you learn how to do. See, manual marketing is what you do when you're selling. Elf marketing is when you automate everything and you turn it into direct mail. So anyway, that was my whole story.

Yeah, and just another thing just quickly on lists. I mean, you know, that was a perfect example. Like Jay Abraham would say, get everything you can out of all you've got. So you've got to see what lists are available. I was talking to somebody here who was in some industry where I said, are there trade magazines Are there things where you might even be able to get a response list? Because they would talking about maybe doing direct mail. So you have to ask a lot of questions, maybe even hire a list broker. But there are people that can do that for you and do the research. So if you can get to those lists, the response rates are going to be so much higher. Sometimes you can't. So then you have to go with whatever resources you can go after. And you were very creative and you did all that stuff, but it's still building a list. It's all about list building. And the other last thing I'll say about list that most online marketers who've ever shipped any kind of physical product at any time, they're sitting on postal addresses. And even if they haven't from the credit card purchases, they're sitting on a postal list that they could then start calculating recency, frequency, monetary, put their VIPs at the top and in a very simple way test some simple direct mail packages to some of those customers. And they're sitting on the list already. They have the postal addresses. So. But they're just, you know, most are just not interested because either they think direct mail's dead or it's never been alive or something.

Well, let me ask you maybe one more thing and then we'll wrap up. What do you think the future of the USPS is?

You know, I mean, they've gotten killed obviously. You know, just, you know, think of something like online billing for example. I mean, you know, they're getting killed on all the things that were their bread and butter, which was first class mail. And there's just so much, I mean everybody still sends cards on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, but it's just they're getting killed there. So I think the future is them figuring out or us and them partnering a lot more because they don't know about this community. Like they, they don't know that we're sitting on, you know, all of these, this marketing expertise that we have, some people still understand, still know something about direct mail. I'll be one of those. But then we have some of the best online marketers in the world. I'm not one of those, but I follow them and I'm a student of all of that. And if we could come up with some strategies. I mean they talk about being involved in online marketing but they're really not right. But if they started thinking about the future will be that they start partnering with online marketers to be able to, this is My opinion, but it's O2O2O, you know, online, offline, online. How do we work with as many marketers as possible to work direct mail into what they're doing? But there's going to have to be a lot of training. There's going to have to be a lot of people that are going to have to teach online marketers about direct mail. I think the Postal Service could be a big partner in that. And then people like, I mean, people that saw the power of direct mail and then the online marketers who have audiences of people that they hooked a little bit about what we're talking about here. I don't know if it's. I don't know if it's late in the day. So I don't know how exciting a topic this is for a lot of people, but I think it's just an amazing opportunity for the best online marketers to learn a channel that could just exponentially move their business. So that would help the.

So if me and Brian in the future did some workshops on the specifics of doing in utilizing direct mail, how many of you would be interested in like, okay, great. And how many of you, as a result of this conversation who didn't even think before you heard it that you would be using direct mail, are now going to start using direct mail? Okay, great.

Great. And that includes sending like 10 Federal Express envelopes to your best customers. I'll count that as direct mail, too.

Yeah. Awesome. Okay, great. So give it up for Brian Kurtz. Thank you. Thank you. No, no, just kidding.

Thank you.

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