Direct Mail Marketing Mastery Featuring Brian Kurtz and Joe Foley - I Love Marketing Episode #438

You want to meet your customers and prospects where they want to be met, not where you think you want to meet them. And you got to have a variety of sources to do that. Always be aware of the life cycle of a new customer entering your world. They can start in either o online or offline, then be directed to the alternate and then pulled back to the original source that o where they started. So it's not there's no one thing. The most dangerous number in business is one.

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I'm going to set up the context for this. I'm Brian Kurtz. I've been a GN member since 2010 or 2011. I can't even remember. I'm a lifer. I'm a Joe Polish lifer. I'm a Genius Network lifer. First of all, the word direct is important here. By direct, we're saying that it's anything in direct marketing. Direct mail is something that is measurable. It's something that if you send out a piece of media, whether it's in the mail, whether it's email, whatever direct marketing says, you have to have a response come back and then pay for the media that you bought. So just a little terminology thing. Direct marketing is not direct mail. Direct mail is direct mail. It's a medium. And it's an important medium still, as it was in yesteryear in 1981. Today, advertising opportunities are infinite and direct mail is still around. And it's just one medium of many. I did a chapter in my book. Chapter three was how paying postage made me a better marketer. Not because direct mail is the be all, end all, but because the discipline that it took to do direct mail in the 1980s and 90s before you hit send, meaning that before you mailed millions of pieces of mail with, with, with printing. There's these things called printing and postage regarding direct mail. And that creates a barrier to entry that you can't do it at home by yourself. It's like making sushi. You know, you can make it at home if you want. I wouldn't recommend it. You want to meet your customers and prospects where they want to be met, not where you think you want to meet them. And you got to have. You got to have a variety of sources to do that. I also talked about O2O2O, which was online to offline to online and I'll just read this quickly. Always be aware of the life cycle of a new customer entering your world. They can start in either o online or offline, then be directed to the alternate and then pull back to the original source that o where they started. So it's not. There's no one thing. The most dangerous number in business is one. One employee, one source and one medium would be a disaster. And there are a lot of online marketers today that they have their entire business on Facebook and Facebook shuts them down and then they're out of business. So direct mail is just another one of those mediums that you can go into to create a variety so that you're diversified in case something goes awry. I'm going to introduce Joe now because Joe, Joe is the, is the physical product maven. He is, he's the, he's the physical product king disc.com that where he works and runs the company, they create physical product and physical content that there's still a big, a big role for that in everything we do. You know, most of the stuff online today, it's a lot of digital courses, digital product. But the companies that have created physical product out of that digital product and created direct mail campaigns on the back end of an online business are the ones that are really doing the most business and the most diversity in their marketing. But remember, direct mail can be a 9 million piece mailing, selling subscriptions, or it can be nine Federal Express envelopes to your most important customers. Both of those are direct mail. So let's keep the context really wide here. That direct mail is not just one thing and it's a variety of things.

So our mailboxes are empty, right? I go home every night still looking for something good in that mailbox. And if I see something interesting I don't like read it right away, I save it and I put it in my Saturday special coffee reading area. Many times in the mail it triggers a thought of maybe an ad I saw or an email I glanced at but didn't have time to read. So what my suggestion is please reach out with mail to get your highly distracted prospects.

Creating a physical product from a digital product is something that a lot of digital marketers don't think about. But the thing is it goes back to the premise that not everybody is going to consume that product in a digital form. They might want to consume it in a physical form and you can actually add more to the price point by offering both or by offering one or the other. And I've seen and the Thing is, you really can't do a direct mail campaign. To sell a direct mail campaign in a, in a, in an envelope or in a magalog or something like that and offer a digital product, it's just not going to work. You need a physical version of the digital product. So having a physical version of everything you do digitally can pay, it's going to more than not just pay for itself. It's going to be another profit center. Because a lot of times the universes don't overlap either. The people who want the physical product are different than the people that want the digital product. So if you have a digital product, think about creating a physical version of it. That's, that would be my advice.

Physical product doesn't compete with digital. It's just complementary. It's just give people the choice. People respect it when you give them a choice. Maybe only 25%. That's kind of a ballpark figure that I've found over the last 10 years, 25% of the people you ask will pay extra for the physical product. Multiple channels of communication are the way to reach everybody. People are so overwhelmed with emails. Some people go periods of time where they're totally on, then they disappear and don't even look at them for weeks. It's so erratic, like social media and stuff. My big message is mine for gold. Travel the road less traveled and reach your prospects and wow your clients. Seems kind of simple, but make them raving fans and they'll refer their friends and they'll be clients for life.

So there have been a lot of studies and we did them at boardroom where we would have like someone who initiated from direct mail and someone who initiated online and tracking the lifetime value of that customer over time if they initiated indirect mail. Now we got maybe got more names online than what we got in direct mail because the direct mail lists are a lot smaller than they were in 1981. But the difference was that if you track lifetime value, if they originated in direct mail, the engagement level, the amount that people have to read we talked about at the beginning today about long copy versus short copy, the engagement level leads to a higher lifetime value for your customer. Even if they start in direct mail, go offline, go online, get digital product, get emails, and then they come back to direct mail or not, or physical product or not. There are studies that have been done by a lot of mailers, but there aren't many mailers that are doing online and offline like that. But the ones that have done it have shown me numbers that say the lifetime value is much higher on names that either originate or with direct mail and then go online. Or they're online and there's an offline component within the marketing mix of the lifetime. And the lifetime value always goes up. You know, you have to realize that everybody is still getting mail. The difference is the least crowded inbox is the one at the end of your driveway. So that that is. And that's what, that's what Joe said. The mailboxes are empty. But that doesn't mean you can throw anything in there. You got to throw in something that's really powerful. QR codes using lumpy mail. If you're going out to your VIPs and you're sending out a Federal Express package as opposed to a standard mail third class mail package, those kinds of things, your creativity. It's unlimited what you can do. But as far as differentiating who are your physical product or direct mail customers, generally it's people who bought from direct mail before. And that's why when you do direct mail, you love to get response lists of people who have responded to direct mail.

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