How to MASTER Direct Mail Marketing: The POWER of Offline & Online Integration!

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. I'm gonna set up the. I'm gonna set up the context for this and then Joe's gonna give some comments and then John. So 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. And I love being here and with all of you. So many great friends and people I've met over the years. So the context, you know, doing 45 minutes on direct mail is a, is a, is a cruel trick because, you know, we can't do it. So what we're going to do is I'm going to give some context and we'll go into some specific things that are going on now with direct mail and then we'll open it up for more of a broad based Q and A. 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 or 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 that goes without saying. And that's the broad umbrella concept of direct mail. What's happened over the last 40 years that I've been in the business that direct mail became synonymous with direct marketing. So when someone says direct marketing, now they think they're talking about just direct mail. Well, they're not, but they are because that's what they think. So that's why we had to do direct response marketing. 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. In 1981, advertising opportunities were finite. Basically, you had direct mail, you had print advertising, you had TV and radio, you had package inserts. But you kind of knew where to find the bodies, where to find the prospects, where to find your family members, as it were. Offline, there was no Internet, no email, nothing of that sort. So today, advertising opportunities are infinite and direct mail is still around and it's just one medium of many. So we'll focus on the few aspects. But the overriding theme is that direct mail is not a be all, end all. It's an and not an or. It was the most scalable marketing medium in the 80s and 90s, but it's not the most scalable anymore. But it's still scalable and it's a great and in your marketing mix, I mean, that's a broad statement and I believe it. And it's still true. It's not old school either. I mean, I think what's old is new again. And I get inquiries all the time. It's like, Brian, can you tell me something about this new medium called direct mail? And you know, when you're a 20 something and don't even know what direct mail is, I think they missed out. Now, I'm not being grandpa saying get off my lawn. And you know, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying those young whippersnappers don't know what they're talking about. That's not my game. I am an online and offline marketer through and through. But 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 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. So I do believe that it's more about. Direct mail is a medium that you're gonna have customers or prospects on your list that are, that's where they're gonna want to be met. You want to meet. 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. In my book I also talked about O2O2O which was online to offline to online. And I'll just read this quickly. This will set up our session. So O2O to O 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 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 in on Facebook and Facebook shuts them down and 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. And so that's just the overall premise. But I just wanted to get the terminology is out. We can't do everything about direct mail in 45 minutes. But we'll do the best we can. And so I'm gonna introduce Joe now. Cause Joe is the physical product maven. He's the physical product king disc.com 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. So Joe is going to, I think he has a couple of slides so he's going to do a go through these and then he'll introduce John and John's going to talk a little bit about the resurgence of QR codes in direct mail. And then we can go wider with anything you want to talk about in terms of direct mail. 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. And now Joe's going to talk about regale us with his expertise and knowledge of physical product. So Joe, you're on.

Thank you, Brian. That was. I appreciate that. And hi everybody. Happy Friday. I am so excited to share. Don't Worry. Just a few slides. They're mostly going to be examples. And I also have one very, very important suggestion to make. And before I go and introduce Legend Named John, first I'll share my screen. And.

There it is.

All right.

There it is.

Okay, so my. My big idea is you guys can see it. I hope it's.

I can't yet.

You can't.

Maybe I'm the only one, but. Oh, here it is. No, no, I can't see it. There you go.

Okay, so see it. Consider physical content delivery the road less traveled. That's kind of what Brian. Brian was saying. Anyways, now if I could figure out how to advance my screen. Oh, there we go. 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. Here's a couple examples. On. On the left is somebody that I've mailed for Yuri Elkheim's brother. I met him in Genius Network, where I meet everybody. And he's done that. Just a simple letter into an envelope. 10,000 a couple times. So like Brian says, if you're paying for it more than once, it's obviously working on the right. Same thing. I did those postcards, four versions in the last four months from another friend from Genius Network. Then down at the bottom, it's kind of a crummy picture, but it's a beautiful direct mail monthly newsletter that John Bowen from CG sends out. And he's been doing this for four years, 2017. So it's obviously working for John now. Something kind of new is those. We call them printed videos. The book opens up and video starts playing. My buddies at Life Aid, who I met at Genius Network, kept doing these. They started with 25, then they ordered 50, then they ordered 100, and four or five years later, they're still working. I have another friend, Todd Herman, who had a cool new book recently, Something about ego. And he sent one of these. He bought 50, and he got the biggest stage ever at the NFL. So they work now free, plus shipping offers. Holy cow. On this page alone is so much money. Right there. Isabel on the left, her and Jeff Segal I met at Genius Network. They've been doing that book or books like that for 10 years. A big volume. Then in the middle.

Dr.

Cream, I met him and the annual event in New York in 2010. He's doing 5 to 10,000 of those MyBody cookbooks every month since last October. So that's amazing. Jeff Walker, of course, that was the biggest, hugest book that I ever did and I'm pretty sure that helped him build his amazing list and all his followers. Then he got Joe's books over the right. Those are super popular and Joe hasn't even tried to market those. He just mentions them on Genius Hour calls. Eventually he's going to blow those out. See those books in the bottom left? That's John Bowen again. He has 12 hardcover books in the last three or four years. So those are amazing results. How about PBS specials? That sounds like something old fashioned. Well, maybe it is, but it's still working. Dr. Kellyanne Genius Network, JJ Virgin, Dr. Trevor Cates are finding great results from that kind of stuff. Virtual event boxes or maybe member gift boxes are on fire.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Hey Joe, can I just say something going back two slides when you talk about the books, the idea of a book 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 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 would be my advice.

That's a great point. Because 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. And why not give it to them if that's how they, they want to get it right. 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. So these back to the virtual swag boxes. I got JJ Virgin on the top left. She had so much yummy treats and vendor swag in there. The one below, that's Jeff Walker. He snuck in all these caffeinated snacks. His everybody loved those. On the bottom right, Shonda Sumter from Genius Network. She is probably my fastest growing client. We're shipping out boxes for her about every three weeks and more and more volume all the time. I did some for Michael Fishman with some personalized journals. Brian Kurtz did the personalized pens. So this stuff's still going great. And my big message is mine for gold. That's how I made the type 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 if you're planning a trip, that's my email. And now it's my pleasure.

Before you introduce John, I want to just talk about a quick thing that you mentioned about stickiness. Stickiness. 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, indirect 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. 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 with direct mail and then go online, or they're online and there's an offline component within the, the. Within. Within the, The. The marketing mix of the lifetime. And the lifetime value always goes up. And Joe had it on the slide. I just wanted to just emphasize that because that was. I don't want that to get lost. Joe.

Thanks, Brian. Another person who commented something like that was Brett Brendan Bouchard. And he used to always say that his goal was to get something in. To your house. He wanted something of his to be inside your office or your house, kind of like your. A guest in someone's home. So that's another reason to get that physical product in there. All right, now it's my pleasure. Two, I'm very excited to introduce my friend, a premier expert in printing and mailing of direct mail, John Webull. His company, Mailings Unlimited. They can take you from concept to print, then mailing. John, his team are the go to pros everyone at Genius Network should contact for your next direct mail, post card and letter project. He's a pro, and he's got some exciting info. I'm talking really hot on fire now. Info to show you about what's working. Everybody should take immediate action. Go ahead, John. Oh.

John, you gotta. You gotta turn your audio on. You're on mute. You're on mute.

There you go.

All right. It's a habit. Joe, thank you so much for introducing me. And I love all the things that I get from Genius Network members that are in my mailbox. And I like even more that I know the guy right here on the screen that's been sending them with his fantastic team.

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 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. And Joe had it on the slide. I just wanted to just emphasize that because I don't want that to get lost.

Joe.

Thanks, Brian. Another person who commented something like that was Brendan Bouchard. And he used to always say that his goal was to get something in to your house. He wanted something of his to be inside your office or your house, kind of like you're a guest in someone's home. So that's another reason to get that physical product in there. All right, now it's my pleasure. Two, I'm very excited to introduce my friend, a premier expert in printing and mailing of direct mail, John Webull. His company, Mailings Unlimited. They can take you from concept to print, then mailing. John and his team are the go to pros everyone at Genius Network should contact for your next direct mail postcard and letter project. He's a pro and he's got some exciting info. I'm talking really hot on fire now. Info to show you about what's working. Everybody should take immediate action. Go ahead, John. Oh.

John, you got to. You got to turn your audio on. You're on mute. You're on mute.

There you go.

All right. It's a habit. Joe, thank you so much for introducing me. And I love all the things that I get from Genius Network members that are in my mailbox. And I like even more that I know the guy right here on the screen that's been sending them with his fantastic team. Before we get into it, I'd like to start with a question. If you have a mailbox, by a show of hands, raise your hand. All right. I think looking at the room and the people I can see on the screen, that should be just about everyone, right? And that's something you need to focus on and in kind of in keeping with, you know, what this awesome two day event has been about. And I won't do this anywhere near as well as Jason Campbell, but I'd like to try something here for a second. I'd like us to do what I call, or would call some direct mail meditation, actually. More direct mail reflection, let's call it. It's really not a meditation, but it's important. That you close your eyes for this. Everybody start by closing your eyes. Take a deep breath in. Slowly breathe in. And now slowly breathe out. Good. And just breathe normally. Read normally and picture your own mailbox. You don't have a mailbox. Picture the place where you receive your mail. What does it look like? What do you see around you? How do you feel right now? Now picture receiving an average size pile of mail. Maybe there's a few letters, some postcards, a catalog, a flyer, a magazine. There may be some smaller product packages, maybe your favorite health supplement that you're about to enjoy. You can feel these pieces in your hands. You experience opening them. You read the material with your eyes. This is a physical connection to people, products, places, information that will likely result in a range of emotions and hopefully actions. Okay, you can open your eyes. Thank you. Thank you for going through that. And I hope it took you to that place. And what you just experienced is something that those in the business like to call the mail moment. Is that moment where you meet all those companies and friends and clients and prospects at the mailbox. And what's crazy is like, this experience happens to every one of us, usually once a day, every single day. Direct mail is the only way for business to participate in this moment. For many businesses, this is their secret sauce, where the return on mailing investment far exceeds the cost of postage and printing and mailing services, which are substantial. You already know that we need to communicate with clients, prospects, friends, family. What makes that communication even better is to put it in the mailbox. Lately, some of you might have noticed some things in your mailbox that seem kind of new. You're kind of like wondering what's going on here. This isn't like my average stuff that's coming in the mail. There's. There's something. There's something different going on here. Maybe it came from a digital source, or at least you're guessing that it did. Or if you look at your mail, there's a way to connect to the sender, to the company in a digital way. So what I'd like to do next is play a little fun game I call what's in John's Mailbox? So I've got some things here. This came in the mail, and I hope it shows on the camera. Okay, this is a postcard, and it's from a company called Tonal. And it's some really cool exercise equipment. And some of you might have it. It's just crazy. It's on the wall and it does all sorts of crazy things. And there's video. And I was on their website probably six months ago. And I know for sure that was the only time I was on their website. And they captured my physical mailing address just for my visit to that website. And they held on to it. And then for Father's Day, because this has revolutionized dad's workout. They held on till then and they made a direct mail campaign and it's only sent to resident, so they didn't really know my name, but they knew where I lived, they knew I was a dad. I don't know how they knew I was a dad, but they hoped I was a dad. And they sent me this card. And it's only because I went to their website. And that's pretty cool because old school direct mail didn't have to connect to the Internet. And this is happening more and more and we're helping clients do this very same thing. This also is in my mailbox and I haven't seen this yet. This was kind of new blue plate specials. So this is some curated content. This is like the newest version of what I've seen of what many of you might know as like a Val pack or something like that. And in here, just to spread that cost of postage out over a bunch of companies, are all sorts of advertisements. And what I'm going to point out about these first two, there's like 20 in here. We're not going to go through them all, but what do you notice about this one? There's a QR code on there. It says, use your smartphone camera to scan the QR code or go to this website. Seems like it's the financial people that are into this. So here's a. If you want some gold. And then there, there it is again. And really pretty to look at. That golden black, fancy QR code, right? If you scan those with your camera phone and all you need is your camera app, you don't need a special app anymore. Most of the phones, iPhones, Androids, you just take out your camera, like you're great at taking pictures and selfies and whatever, and you point it and it says you want to go to this site and boom, you're there. Just think about how much content can be there from that QR code. So that's the other thing. We've been doing more of it at Mailings Unlimited, where we mailed 100 million mail pieces last year. We're starting to put a lot more QR codes on postcards and letters and snap packs, if you know what those are. And they take you to a digital property where anything can really happen. You can start a chat. You can even get a fax. We have a company that wants fax, and I think earlier we were talking about, like, reaching doctors. I think it was in a small group that I was in. And apparently doctors, they still say, fax me. So it's amazing where direct mail has been and where it is now, but it all ends up in that mail moment. And I encourage any of you to. To try to be a part of that.

Okay?

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