Interview With Jon Webel On The Power of Digital Direct Mail and EDDM

I'm dean jackson. He's joe polish, and this is the.

I love marketing podcast. Hello, this is Joe Polish, and I want to welcome you to a special edition of I Love Marketing episode. This is a recording that I did in my office with Joel Cohen and a guy named John Webull, like Rebel with a W. And we talked about direct mail and special ways that you can use direct mail in marketing. And I think you're going to find it really valuable. Now, as many of you that listen to I Love Marketing know, I started out as a Deborah carpet cleaner, living off credit cards. And I learned direct response marketing starting back in 1992 because I needed to eat, I needed to survive. And I transformed my small carpet cleaning company using direct mail mostly and offline advertising, because there really was no Internet back then. And I did it in an industry selling something that nobody wants to buy, which is carpet cleaning. And what I've said many times is that if you sell something more exciting and more sexy than professional cleaning services, you can probably utilize these strategies. One of my favorite forms of marketing, one of my favorite delivery systems and is direct mail. So I sat down with Joel and with John and we talked about it. And so I want you to pay special attention, and I hope this encourages you to use direct mail, even if you've never done it before, even if you've never thought you could have success with it or you think you're in an industry where it does not apply, because I can assure you, it applies to almost every industry, and it is a great way to add a tremendous amount of impact, income, and connection with your prospects and your clients. So listen to the episode and have a great day. Hello, this is Joe Polish, and here at the Piranha Marketing headquarters with a couple of guys got John Webull, like Rebel with a W and Joel Cohen. And I want to give you some background on what's going on here. We just got done speaking to a group of professional cleaners and restorers. And John has a company called Mailings Unlimited. And me and Joel gave a presentation teaching the service companies how to build and grow their business using every door direct mail, talking about different sorts of marketing strategies. And John, you have a company that produces print and direct mail and helps companies generate more business. So I'd like to. And you flew here for 13 hours.

That's a long time.

Well, I was only on a plane for eight and a half hours. The rest was driving.

Right. Okay, so give us a little bit of background as Joel nearly knocks over the recording device here of your company and what you do.

Awesome. Thanks, Joe. Mailings unlimited has been around for 12 plus years, and we started from the beginning as a company focused on digital printing for the purpose of putting mail pieces in people's mailboxes that really make a difference. Not just a static mail piece, but one that might address something unique about them, at least their name. Everybody has a name, and everybody likes the sound of their name, usually. And we try to put a person's name on every mail piece. But as time went on, we found out that technology was getting faster and better, and we were able to do cool things like actually put the car that somebody's driving on a mailpiece. So I should know what you guys drive, but what's your car, Jeff?

I have a range rover.

A range rover and a Ferrari. And a Ferrari, Joel's Ferrari. So each of these guys, when they get a mail piece from mailings unlimited, will have their car on the mail piece. So that in the mailbox, it's like, hey, that's my car. Maybe I should look at this mail piece in relation to all the other mail that's in the mailbox. So that's the type of mailing that we really focus on at mailings unlimited, and we look for the clients that will take the most advantage of that type of technology.

Let me say this, too, because people that are in our. We have an elite group for our piranha members, Many professionals that are in the service industry, you know, cleaners and restorers and things like that. Although what we're going to talk about, I think applies to, you know, anyone that has something, you know, awesome to sell and needs ways to expand the business. What I want to talk about for just a couple minutes is direct mail in general, Because a lot of people think because of the Internet and everything that. Well, and I've said this on many different interviews, is that there's less noise in people's mailboxes than ever before. And where there's less noise, there's an opportunity to make some noise, there's an opportunity to fish where people used to fish and they don't fish anymore because they redirected their efforts into other arenas. And so I'm a huge believer in direct mail because of the physical aspects of it, because you can very much target with it. And I've said this numerous times. I mean, maybe this will change as we go along, but if I could only rely on one method of marketing, if I could only be allowed one online email, social media, tv, radio, direct mail, whatever I would literally pick direct mail. Now, I'm biased because I learned marketing in that world. So I have a certain. I have quite a level of expertise because I spent millions of dollars on stamps and letters and stuff, and I've produced a lot of results doing that. And I've helped my clients make a fortune, in some cases using direct mail. But what I want to say about it is just, even with electronics, going back to something I learned from Gary Halbert, the apol bpol analogy, where people of America sort their mail out, or probably anywhere in the world where there's metal, they sort their mail out over a wastebasket. Everything that is junk or appears like junk goes in the B P. Personal or appears personal goes in the A pile. So when you talk about direct print, then you are really not just Dear John, but if it was Joe and you were an auto dealer that sold me, let's say, a Range Rover, you're a Range Rover. Two years later, there's a new Range Rover coming out. Or it's the same dealer that owns the Mercedes dealership. They could send. You even showed me this. You could send a postcard with my Range Rover on it and. And then other cars that I may be interested in with my name, and you can put a map from my house where you're mailing the postcard to, driving to the dealership's address and show.

You the way to go there, that.

Would be printed on the postcard.

Exactly.

Personalized maps and personalized cards.

Right. So I want to point out that there are some things that you can do with direct mail that are so damn personal. Like if you owned a restaurant, I mean, you could literally send everyone in a particular neighborhood, you know, here is how to get to the restaurant from my house, Judy and John. And if you did a survey where you started gathering information about people, what they're into, you know, if they're into golf, if they're into fishing, you can literally put that into the campaign. One of the things I'm talking with you about here is I have my Genius Network members, and what we do at Genius Network meetings is we capture their visions, their goals, things that they're into, things that they do. And before we started recording this episode, I talked to you about, oh, what if we have an animation created for each person and totally personalize it? And then you start sending these very personalized campaigns with some of our 25k members, goals of what they have for the next 12 months so that they get this thing, and they're like, wow, that's pretty awesome.

Kind of reminds me of what goes back to Gary Halbert's Letter from Grandma, you know, the one that gets opened. Because it's the personal. More personal you make something, the more apt it is to be read.

Exactly.

And so it's like, man, when you start talking about these type of details that you can put into a mailing, is it handwritten?

No.

Or of course it could have handwritten looking aspects.

In the digital printing world, we do handwriting fonts and they look pretty compelling most of the time.

Like, you know, so a handwritten message with all this personalization, all of a sudden you have such a compelling piece in front of you that it's going to get a response like no other.

Well, let's talk about something that we do for our professional cleaners because if they're listening to this, I want them to know that for one, we've already got things that are created that they can use. And you as our person, you have a company that can actually execute it for them. You can print it, you can oversee the mailing. And in the world of like direct mail back in the day, you know, we refer to them as letter shops. And I still do, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of people today don't even know what that means. If you say letter shop.

Yeah, no, it's.

What's the.

Are you a letter shop? Are you different than a letter shop? How would you describe that in today's world and for what you're doing?

Yeah, that's an interesting question, Joe. Letter shops still exist today. And when you say letter shop, I think of a company that's going to, you know, receive maybe some pre printed things and then receive some envelopes and they're like, okay, we're going to put these two things together. We're going to put addresses on it. We're going to make a letter mailing for you. Okay. And those are very different things. The printer would do the printing and the letter shops would do the fulfillment.

Of the assembly of it.

Yeah. And that was very common when we started Mailings Unlimited and we wanted to have that all under one roof. So that's why we put printing equipment and digital printing equipment, not static printing equipment, digital printing equipment that allows everything to be personalized under the same roof as the equipment that, you know, the inserting machine, so that at high speed you can put things in that envelopes, because envelopes are still a great thing to do. And so that's kind of the difference between a letter shop of the bygone days. And what we do, we put it all under one roof. And a lot of other printers are doing the opposite. They're putting mailing stuff under their roof. So the guys that like we're doing the printing and giving to the letter shops have now brought letter shop type things into their facilities. But we were onto this trend 12 years ago and they're just figuring it out now. So that's why you don't hear letter shops so much now, because it really is just. It's your print and mail provider.

Right, right.

And I bring that up because, like what I always liked about that term, you know, just letter shop. It's a shop that's going to get your letters put out for you.

It's a great name, actually.

Right. There's a lot of people that don't do direct mail because for one, they don't have any expertise in it. And then secondly, they don't realize that there's actually companies that soup the nuts will do pretty much everything.

Absolutely.

And what we were talking about earlier is that you can do all of this on a very small scale. I mean, I remember back in the day when I first started doing direct mail in large quantities, probably 1992 is when I started ramping stuff up a lot of times in order to just get a good cost. You bought a lot of stuff pre printed, but if you had never tested a sales letter or never tested something, a lot of times you could print a ton of stuff trying to save money. But it would cost you sometimes the same amount of money to print up 200 pieces as it would 10,000 it would. But if it didn't work, then you have this obligation. But now you can do onesie twosie personalized stuff because of technology.

Exactly. And the manufacturers of this printing equipment knew this and that's why they've really put a lot of R and D into it. One of our pieces of equipment is made by Hewlett Packard and they've really led the way for this. And it was just crazy magic science ten years ago, really. Every page can change because the way it was, you would have to go buy 5,000 static letters. And you got a much better price because you make one printing plate or eight if you're doing full color. And you just keep running and running and running. And the more you ran, the cheaper your price per unit went because all you're doing is making copies of that. But the digital presses allow you to make every page different. And at first they were really expensive. Like people would pay for just an 8 1/2, 11 sheet of paper. You would pay like 75 cents just to have one. Almost like the copy store, another shop, the copy shop. And those prices have come down like crazy. And now you probably can go to the copy shop and get some digital printing, variable, personalized print done, but they probably aren't going to mail it for you. So, you know, I have a question.

That we run across a lot in talking to cleaners and restorers. So they pick a marketing piece. They decide, okay, I am going to do direct mail. I'm going to use your every door direct mail piece that, you know, Piranha Marketing designed.

And so for those of you listening on audio, he's holding one of these in his hand right now.

Picture that.

Fanning himself.

Yeah, there's a couple of sizes. There's this giant one that's about as big as a flat screen computer. It's huge. But what people do is they go, well, I'm going to mail that. And then they look at other facets of mail and go, well, out of all the facets of mail I could send, so I could send a letter that looks like a handwritten letter from grandma to my list, or they say I could send this pink flyer that Piranha produces, this giant pink flyer. I could mail that, or I could do the EDDM piece. And so, I mean, what do you have to say is, you know, to people that are choosing one versus three.

You know, and those are just the three that you mentioned. There's, there's probably hundreds and hundreds more. The most important thing about the mail piece to choose is the one that you actually send. Because seriously, there's, there's so many people that just don't partake in direct mail marketing.

What's the idea? What's the best idea? The one that you use, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, the best idea is the one that you use. But, you know, we have put together some different pieces here and you can get different results by mailing a different piece at a different time. It's amazing, like, because we've, these pieces have been out there for a while and some people have mailed the small one and said, oh, I did great. And then some people have mailed the really big one. They've done great with that as well. Sometimes not as well with the other piece.

It's like one thing I keyed in on too is, you know, people, the clients that we have that are mailing these, you know, they're getting a certain response off of one and they go, oh, you know, What I'm doing, I'm doing the every door direct mail piece. So I'm good. What I think people need to realize is that that's one facet of direct mail. And like John said, there's hundreds of others. But out of the ones that, you know, the prominent ones that we teach at Piranha, as long as you're getting a return on investment and that's a vehicle that's bringing in money for you every time you send it out, there's nothing wrong with adding another layer, another different facet.

Let's say this too, as we kind of go deep into it for the people that are listening. I want to. We'll talk about this in relation to, say, our professional cleaners and restorer clients. Although this would apply to anyone, this sort of advice. And what I'd like to do is even define every door direct mail. That's one of the things that we are recommending that they do say, and I'd like to have us explain what this even is. And then let's kind of go through one that we offer so our clients that are listening to this actually understand deeper what it is we are recommending that they do and how they do it. And some people that are going to listen to this are already doing it. So this will to give them a deeper understanding of what is the psychology behind this and how does it actually work and why is it a smart idea. And then for people that say, wouldn't do every door direct mail, let's talk about different sort of campaigns, kind of what you're talking about with these different ideas. Let's at least first define it, because when people hear it, I want them to be like, what are these guys talking about?

Yeah, so every door direct mail. And I don't know exactly when they came up with the term with the postal Service, but within the last couple of years was a brilliant idea, I think, on their part, to get more business and to make things easier for your average small company to have access to direct mail. So they came up with this. And the idea is you pick a carrier route, which is usually what a carrier can take to a certain number of houses. So it's usually like 350 to no more than 600 or so. And you just pick one. You pick it off of a map. They actually have a tool online where you can visualize the map and it lights up and you say, okay, that's a neighborhood where I'd like to mail to every door. So that's kind of where it comes from every door direct mail, you're going to mail to every door within this carrier route. Now, that type of mailing's been around since the beginning. I mean, we call it in the business a saturation mailing. And the rates that you get are pretty much similar. So what they've done is they've taken saturation mailings that only mail houses could do and made it so that everybody could do it just by walking into the post office and saying, hey, can you deliver these to everybody, please? So it was really a smart move on the postal services point. Mailings Unlimited has put a little twist on it with Piranha Marketing, though. We're talking about our every door direct mail pieces, but we're actually personalizing these every door direct mail pieces because we buy a mailing list instead of just picking that carrier route. Our customer tells us the carrier route. But then we go ahead and we buy the names that are in there. We can get like 70% of the names. So we personalize the pieces with names. So we're doing an old school saturation mailing. Personalized. And it's just like every door direct mail, but better because we're personalizing it. But we're really glad that the post office thought of this because one, they need help.

Well, yeah, no, they need help.

And Joe, only if all the other marketing methods went away. He needs direct mail. So we got to keep the postal service alive.

I actually have an idea of how I think I could save the post office from all the billions they are losing.

Oh, Joe, I hope you do, because my livelihood right now anyway, depends on it.

You know what, here's the funny thing that a lot of service businesses don't realize. I mean, with all the different service companies and people that listen to my I love marketing podcast and all kinds of stuff, I mean, we've really encouraged a lot of people to use direct mail. And I have some genius network members that were not using direct mail. I had one of them tell me at the last meeting that I've doubled my business in literally the last. I think it was three or four months using direct mail. And this is a person who's already running a multimillion dollar business.

That's awesome.

And using direct mail. And this is all an online company that knows how to do conversions, but they mail out physical stuff and they have addresses and they are mailing to these people and they are getting responses from direct mail that just are so much bigger and higher and better than email. Although a lot of these clients were acquired fully Online.

And they work together, email and direct mail, if the company knows what they're doing.

Yeah, well, it's kind of like what you were even saying earlier, Joe, like someone will send something out once. But, you know, my buddy Brian Kurtz, who's a genius network member, he says, who's mailed millions of letters, I mean, with. He runs Boardroom Inc. And has done that for many years. They're a huge company in their heyday, 100, 150 million a year in sales, mostly direct mail. And he says you should never define yourself by a channel. You're not an Internet marketer. It's just a marketing method. And I always like the thing that Gary Halbert would say. There's three things you need in order to sell something. You need a product or service. You need a sales pitch or a marketing message, and you need a delivery system. And a delivery system is like, you know, back in the day before the Internet, I would say, you know, tv, radio, telemarketing, yellow pages, Valpak postcards, you know, banner ads, that sort of stuff. Banners, Like, I wouldn't say banner ads.

Big banners.

The analog version.

Yeah. So today, another delivery system, obviously, all the different online things, all the different social media, all the, you know, micro blogs, I mean, all that sort of stuff. But so direct mail is a delivery system. And if you've got a product or service and you've got a sales message, put it on a piece of paper and mail it. And so going back to every door, direct mail is this. Who can't use every door direct mail?

That's a good question. There's some companies where it just wouldn't make sense to spend a lot of money sending it to all these people, because all those people aren't going to buy your product or service. So if you have a very specific product, like cars are a great example, everybody needs a car. But if you're selling equipment to a dentist, you're selling X ray equipment to a dentist or something like that, you need a list of dentists. Well, you don't use every door direct mail. You need to go and get a list, which that's what we do too, in a mailing company. That's the other type of mail that we do which is truly targeted. Every door direct mail is targeted by the carrier route. You know, 300 to 600 people that are in an area that all want your service. Targeted mail is, like I said, you know, if you're selling X ray machines to dentists, you need a list of dentists.

Right.

And so we buy a list of dentists and we send out a mailing that talks about, you know, all the great things about your X ray machines.

So for instance, when we are marketing to carpet cleaners, we don't do every door direct mail to carpet cleaners, but we have our carpet cleaners do every door direct mail to their clients because they're in localized areas. You know, a guy in Wichita is gonna, you know, a guy in la, a person in Kansas City, a person in New York City, you know, they do every door direct mail. But we as a company don't do. But we do a lot of direct mail in other arenas.

Right.

Just think about the way that this used to, the way it had to be done in the past. I mean, you would drive a neighborhood is what you used to do, and go, okay, that's, you know, for a service business, they drive a neighborhood go, these are my target customers. I already have some. And then, you know, you get an address or two and then go what, to the library? Look up the reverse address. I can't remember. And then, you know what? Google Maps came out and I was amazing. I was so happy when Google Maps came out because then as a, as a service provider, I could look at the map and go, oh, okay, there's my client that I did on that street. And now I can click on the images and see the housetops and I could kind of count the houses and create what we used to do as carrier routes, like for our own deliverers that would then go put out canvassing to do canvas and do our marketing pieces.

And that's still a great. Again, like we're talking about all these different ways to market. That's still works.

But what's so exciting about. So that's a very manual process, lots of details to manage. And what's so exciting about something as simple as this? Every door direct mail or saturation mail is it's all done now. It's all digitized completely. I go, I point at the house that I did a service at. It goes, highlights all the rest of the house for me. And then I say, hey, John, the carrier route number is this. And then it's hands off. I don't have to ever think about that neighborhood again, except for to say, John, mail these three pieces two weeks apart. A first, second and third notice. And then when that's done, can your company in three months hit that same neighborhood again?

Absolutely.

And then I hands off. And then I can scale it.

What's the minimum amount of every door Direct mail that someone can do, it's.

Really generated by the carrier route. You have to mail to a whole carrier route. I don't. I should look this up. What's the smallest carrier route in the country? There probably is a really small one somewhere.

But I know that the post office.

A few hundred, they deliver.

They probably won't do every door direct mail at this, but they still deliver mail to the most remote addresses in Alaska and by mule train to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Yeah, there's the last that I read about it, the US Postal Service has one of the largest distribution systems in the world. 525,000 carriers. And even with that, they, they still lose mail. I mean, mail. Of course they lose mail. They definitely still lose money. They still lose money, which is the same as mail. But it's a Freudian slim. They still lose mail. Okay. No, but that was like, funny. I'm not even going to edit this. So we're just going to leave that.

In there because that's hysterical.

I'm so intense on this. They're going to lose the mail. Oh, man, I wish everyone that's listening to this could be in the room right now. For some reason that very stupid comment was funny. But the point is they lose money because all of this, I mean, so here's the thing. I'm hoping that people will, whatever little dent we can make in this. I hope many people listen to this and really start ramping it up because the people that will save the post office, if it is saveable, are entrepreneurs.

Exactly.

And secondly, it is a great opportunity to like, in many cases, I know there are people that are listening to this that truly that if they aren't using any form of direct mail, this one thing alone could double their business in some cases, double, triple, quadruple it. And I have seen that happen time and time again where an Internet marketing company or someone heavily focused on, you know, doing everything online, they, they go to direct mail and they can just, I mean, they can't believe it because there's, there's no competition. If you're a single guy, do you want to go into a nightclub that's totally crowded with like five guys for every, for every woman? Or do you want to go to like a yoga studio where you're like the only dude? Well, it's like, it's, it's the same.

Every door direct.

Now the yoga studio.

Wait, wait, wait. What kind of pants would I have to wear if I went to the yoga studio? That's the question.

I'M just using that as an analogy. But the point is, it's really. That is as best as I can make the comparison, that is what the opportunity we have with direct mail. So, Joel, do you want to. Why don't you explain one of the things that we do for professional cleaners so people would have an idea of how we actually implement this strategy? Because anyone could put a stamp on something. But if you have a crappy sales message, like I said, three things you need in order to sell something. If you just had your product or service and then you just send a letter to someone, direct mail. But the letter sucks, the copy sucks, the list sucks, the offer is terrible. Marketing is really about what you say and who you say it to. So the list is critical. You can do every door direct mail to the wrong neighborhood with the wrong.

Product, it ain't going to work.

But if you have it targeted, you can absolutely kill it. And again, every door direct mail is one thing, but I talk about how we do it here and how it's helping our clients.

Yeah. So the thing that we did with this large every door direct mail piece, the huge one that I was saying is about the size of a computer screen, is we took that real estate and we took a version of what was, you know, back in the day, the ultimate sales letter for carpet cleaners.

Right.

That Jim Woolverton wrote.

Yep.

And essentially we took the same concepts because he followed very specifically the news. Excuse me. He followed very specifically the components that need to be in a direct response piece.

So I'd like you to go over that, because I think that'll make this episode instructional.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, at the very top of the piece, we take a large portion of it and there are graphics on this, and we can. We can have this. Some imagery of this online, too, with the podcast, so that people can see a little bit about what's on this. Okay, well, as I look at this here, and we're reading, we have a headline across the.

And by the way, you can see that @RichCleaner blog, because everywhere this is heard, you might stumble across this episode somewhere. But we'll put it on richcleaner.com and then you can click on the podcast.

Yeah, exactly.

I keep saying RichCleaner blog.

Well, they're all. They're both. They're almost synonymous. But richcleaner.com is where you want to go. And as we go over this piece, essentially there's a headline at the beginning, and the headline captures the benefits. The main Benefits almost the USP of what your company is or what, what you would want to satisfy usp, meaning unique Selling Proposition. Unique Selling proposition, yes. Thank you. So essentially, like with this one, we covered the main things that people want is they want a thorough cleaning on the carpets, they want one that's going to dry quickly and they don't want it to get dirty fast. So this headline, you have to see it. You got to go to richcleaner.com to see it. I'm not going to give it away here. You got to look.

Okay.

Because I think it's important to go there. It's a great headline if you use it in your business. We saw like 600% increase when we went from a marketing piece that had this on, it had a normal headline on it to this headline.

And you're talking about the personalized one. You just don't want to say the whole thing or just not that you want them to see the personalization of it.

And the personalization's on there too. But I'm talking about the actual headline.

Yeah. Well, I'll give them a little teaser then. It starts out with the Cohen family deserves. And it could be the Polish family, it could be the, the Jones family, it could be the whatever.

That's the little secret sauce that we added to every door. Direct mail. We made personalized.

Yeah. And then another personalization feature, the digital at the top is it has, you know, for each notice of this that you send out, the headline can be changed to, you know, a little more. Hey, we sent you something. It's about time, you know, are you going to take us up on the offer? Your carpet's crying out for help. Why don't you respond?

So it's a multi sequence mailing, so step letters.

Yeah.

So it's kind of like the time to quit going back to the well with a bucket. Dipping it in. Well is when you pull the bucket up and there's no water. So you want to keep a lot of people where the mistake they make is if they have a success once they stop, you can keep going back to the same neighborhoods and stuff until it actually costs more money to mail it than it brings in in terms of people hiring you or responding to your promotions or campaigns. And so multi sequence mailings are very valuable.

Yeah. And then other aspects of this particular piece, the personalization of, you know, not only the, the family name on the header of the flyer, but also the neighborhood name.

If the cleaner knows, if the professional carpet cleaner knows that that carrier route has A name?

Yeah, of a neighborhood.

Like it's roughly this neighborhood. We can put it on there. I wish there was a database of that. I've looked to say, like, because I don't know, this street's in the so and so neighborhood. But the most people can come up with that name for us, which I thought was really cool. Like, I don't know what neighborhood it is, but you know, what neighborhood.

The Palatial Polish Estates.

Yes, yes. Or, you know, or West Seattle, you know, or just different segments of a city that are real specific.

So one of the guys was asking me, where do I find that? No, you have to tell us.

Yeah, go. Yeah, that one's there. But different personalization aspects are there. You want me to go over each of these components that we did at the presentation or do you think.

I mean.

Yeah, because it's like, you know, you have things.

Well, let's explain the successful elements that we recommend that you actually put in a direct mail campaign. If someone wants to see ours, they can go to Richgler and check it out with the show notes or whatever we're going to call this. I haven't decided yet, by the way, people listening. This was not planned, this recording. We just got done doing a two and a half hour talk and we decided let's sit down and talk about this stuff. Because I like selling stuff to people and I think people should be using this. And so although we're not selling anything here, we're just like not getting paid to teach people brilliant advice and they're all like just using it.

It's 13 hours for you to go home.

Right. I want John to feel like he made a contribution company for 13 hours before he loses his family and his wife and everything.

Okay, so intelligently going through this. It has a very compelling headline that satisfies some of the biggest concerns the client. That's the one of the largest sections on the front page. The others the next section underneath. That gives reasons why they need that service. So things. So sand is scratching your doling carpet. That's reason number one, why your carpet's crying out for help. Reason number two is there's residue collecting dirt. How do the traffic lanes feel on your carpet? Reason number three, pollutants in the air force filtered through your carpet. Is the air starting to smell stale? And so underneath those, we've got all sorts of reasons as to why they need to be concerned about this. There's a large picture of a dust mite on the front of this flyer because people's objection Is. Well, yeah, I don't really need carpet cleaning. My carpets don't look dirty. But professional cleaners know that there's lots of stuff in there that needs to be taken out. And also the sand that you can't see needs to be taken out.

So John is trying to totally protect his phone from buzzing right now, so. But it's okay.

It's okay.

You probably can't even hear. That's why they called him out.

I'm like, I'm waiting for myself.

It's on silent.

But like the buzz. Who knew that the buzz could be so loud?

Joel's not eating for like a 24 hour period.

If you hear my stomach roar.

If we see him faint during this, he can't even read anymore. If this podcast becomes incomprehensible, it's just totally hunger pain.

The next thing that we go over here is the guarantee and we put a real big, bold guarantee on there, which is awesome because it's risk reversal. Right. So in other words, there's no risk for the client or the prospect that's thinking of hiring you. They don't have to wonder, well, what if he doesn't do a good job? You take all the risk away and you offer a money back guarantee with a nice personalization on the front of the flyer of the. The owner and their website and all those things. You're gonna flip it. No, no, on the back we use third party edification. So what that means, to be clear, is somebody that isn't you giving you glowing testimonials or some sort of a certification process or a verification process for your service that shows that you're legit. Yeah.

You could even take like, say Yelp reviews, and if you wanted to pull one out that was really favorable, you know, as said on Yelp or whatever, which is a smart thing. I mean, even back in the day when Amazon was first starting, I was consulting with Bill Phillips Body for Life, because I was his marketing consultant. I had him doing a ton of direct mail, multi sequence mailings. Actually, the very first consultation I did with him, I gave him the suggestion. He had showed me one letter that had brought in $2 million in sales. And I said. And he said, I'm the marketing department here. I don't have anyone that can write copy like this. I need more letters like this. I said, you know, have you ever mailed that letter more than once? He's like, no. I go, have you ever heard of three step letters? He's like, yeah. I go, have you ever done them he's like, no. I said, well, take the same letter and mail it to everyone on the list. Because he was offering Myoplex, you know, that was his supplement. And he still owned the as at that time. He sold it in 1999, but this was in 1997. And I said, we'll take the same letter, send it to everyone on the list that were all subscribers to his magazine back then, which was Muscle Media. And I hand wrote. I said, can I write on the letter? And I wrote, second notice. We sent this to you a couple weeks ago. Still haven't heard from you. Circling the offer, circling the deadline. Writing sideways, just like we got here. We got this handwritten in which you can do. You can do fake handwriting or you can do real and print it.

Copy doodles.

Yeah, exactly. And so he sent that same letter out to this big list two more times, and it brought in an additional $3 million of revenue. So had he stopped at letter number one, he would have literally only brought in 2 million. And that was on the first consultation, in the first hour. He hired me. So from that point forward, he started paying me 10 grand a day. That's when I was 10 grand a day. Now I'm like 25 grand for half a day. But back then, I was $3,850 for consulting. So the first consultation, I charged him $3,850. I made that number up. But I was Dan Kennedy, and he told me that's what I should charge way back then. This is like 1997. And so basically I gave him that idea. And from that point forward, he just started paying me ten grand a day for consulting because of the value I created there. But, see, you give this sort of advice to the right person. Same stuff, same thing. The same thing we've been teaching carpet cleaners. I just gave it to a guy that was running a multimillion dollar business, and that was one thing. But like. So going back to what prompted me here, you said edification. Once Body for Life came out, he started getting reviews on Amazon. He would actually print the website page and mail that out as a direct mail piece. And one of the things, you've got all these companies that are out there that have people that write glowing reviews of them online, and they never take those reviews online and put them in a physical form and send it out as a postcard or send it out as a direct mail piece. And it's nuts because you are getting amazing testimonials if you're good and people don't Leverage it.

Yeah, it's like, go ahead.

I'm sorry. You know what else is crazy? They'll just grab one. Well, with digital direct mail, you could grab hundreds and at least have the testimonial be somebody down the street or at least in the same state. When I'm buying something that's like, Bob, California, I'm in Maine. That's great that Bob in California likes it. But does anybody in Maine like this or whatever. You could actually have the testimonials from Be Location Driven. That's really cool because there's so many testimonials these days with Yelp and things like that.

And just one more thing on that topic of pasting the review company plus the review from your client, it's just double as far as edification because instead of just now, it's not only a person, but now it's a third party company that you know and trust with the person that you can verify is a good reliable source. In addition, that takes up a large section on the backside is this third party edification. And then in addition to that, we have 10 reasons why you should choose us. And these are not features. So they're benefits. And features are like, okay, we've been in business 20 years, we use truck mounted carpet cleaning. Those are things that really don't mean a ton to your client. They're assumed benefits. That or that prospect is reading those and going, okay, well what does that mean for me, really? Everybody lists features when you look at advertising. So it's like, okay, they do carpet cleaning, they use truck mounts. They do, you know, they've been in business X amount of years. But it doesn't explain what those benefits are. This flyer lists out the 10 reasons why somebody should choose this company. And I'll give you a few of them here.

Well, I could point out ethical services. That's one of the best reasons why.

Someone should ever choose a carpet cleaner.

And if you're, if you're a carpet cleaner and you're not a member of ethical services, then you're either not ethical or you're not aware of ethicalservices.com and if you're someone who's not, but you want to find the right cleaner, go to ethicalservices.com and type in your zip.

Code or scan the QR code that's on there.

But here's the thing, That's a feature, ethicalservices.com but coupled because that is on this flyer, it is a feature that's listed, but coupled with it is the reasons why it has benefits because you go there to read the consumer guide to carpet cleaning and learn eight mistakes to avoid when choosing a cleaner. Four steps to a fresh healthy carpet and what to expect from a good cleaning company, Normal versus special cleaning and what's ethical. So there you took a feature that maybe the consumer doesn't know about and then we gave them all the benefits and the reasons why they should go there. Yes. And so the same thing is true with all of the reasons why they should choose the company going into, you know, long lasting deep cleaning benefit, we restore your dingy and dull carpet benefit. Our truck, you know, here they, they're saying they use truck mounted cleaning but instead of just saying that, they go our truck mounted high powered steam extraction processes or process kills germs, bacteria and dust mites on contact. So those are a few. There's 10 reasons. I'm not going to list them all because we don't have enough time today. But go to richcleaner.com to see how you can get this and mimic it and start using it in your business. One more component. One of the most important components on this big giant postcard is the offer that's on the card. Because the offer is the. You got to have that on the flyer. You got to have the compelling reason to take action from all the education we just gave the prospect. They got to have that compelling reason to do something about what we just said them. We have the world best offer for carpet and upholstery cleaners ever tested, ever. The results on this are just hands down, it's the best offer that could ever be made.

Which is kind of amusing if you sit and think about there are thousands of cleaners all over the world that every day are trying to generate more business and the ones that have the unfair advantage of being Piranha marketing members and are smart enough to be Piranha marketing members and actually get access to this use this offer that has been tried, trued and tested for 20 years with all kinds of reiterations and honing and things like that. And there's all kinds of people that are out there that are putting price offers out there bitching about the fact that they think people only care about price, but that's the only thing that they know how to fish with and they don't have this information. So looking at how we even construct an offer is very important because if you're in the cleaning and restoration business, you certainly want to be using this sort of offer. If you're an Ethical company. I mean, this doesn't work well with bait and switch companies, and it doesn't work well with people that don't deliver a service that people value enough to where they would write a glowing review and refer you and have you come back. But it does work incredibly well.

Should we tell them what the offer is?

No, not really. Well, it's a combination, though. See, it's not as simple as that because it's one thing about the offer, but. But it's how you do it. So we offer free room and carpet cleaning. That's an offer. But if you just offer free room of carpet cleaning without explaining the criteria, they're targeting it to people that aren't homeowners, like renters. Like, you could do every door direct mail to an apartment complex and not offering a free room. Not good. If you don't do it with our carpet audit process, it's not going to present itself right. So the way to mess up that offer is to execute it improperly. It's kind of like saying, you know, bench press, but, well, if you lay on a bench press and then you like, you know, throw jello through you and rub it all over your body, laying on a bench press is tended to lift weights. That was a really bad analogy. I was trying to come up with something like, what's the stupidest thing that someone could do on a bench press that I could actually say on? But anyway, but the point is, like, there's a lot of people that will screw up anything because they're not doing it right. You know, it's the analogy I used to use years ago when people are like, direct mail doesn't work or yellow pages doesn't work. And I would say, well, I heard Dan Kennedy, because Dan used to write a lot of my sales copy for the first nine years of my business. So I used to have lunch with Dan all the time and everything. And so he had this thing where he talked about. I think it was Dan. It might have come from someone else. But years ago, I would give this analogy of planes fly. People say, well, direct mail doesn't work. It's like, well, it's like saying planes don't fly. Well, planes fly all the time. And if a plane crashes, you don't say, planes don't fly or flying doesn't work. You say, well, was there something wrong with the weather? Was there something wrong with the pilot? Were there terrorists on board? What were the conditions that caused the crash? So if your marketing crashes, you can't just say, oh, online Marketing doesn't work, or Facebook advertising doesn't work, or TV doesn't work, or direct mail doesn't work. I mean all of those things work. You just got to know how to work them. And so it's one thing about. So you take what you do with unlimited mailings. If you take a piranha member who actually has this here, what we're going through, and they send it out, their chances of success with this is going to be far greater than someone that doesn't have the copy, that doesn't have the offer, that doesn't have the guarantee, that doesn't have the headline, that doesn't have all of the elements. So there's a recipe and if you leave these things out, it's like baking bread without the yeast. It's just. And you shouldn't. I'm kind of glad gluten free. So I don't. And then all the gluten free bread tastes kind of like crap anyway. So, you know, certain things just make certain breads taste a certain way. And certain things and ingredients in a marketing campaign make it work really well or mediocre. And so that's sort of the spiel.

Yeah.

So this plane flies.

This plane flies. We know it flies. The other thing too about that free room offer is we have an entire training session, probably hours and hours of training sessions when we look at the years compiled, but a more recent training session on the magic behind the free room offer and really how to make that work for you and for your prospects that are taking advantage of it. And one of the most current stats we have is from Johnny Wendler who got. He sent out this promotion, was sending out, you know, it's off. The final offer is one room free. He did an average of $299 per free room without any bait and switch type of pressure, sales or anything like that. But by following the little formula that we put together on the magic behind the free room that happens all the way from the moment the customer calls in to the final free room appointment. 299 bucks for a quote unquote free room. And everybody left happy. The customer. It's just the most awesome offer. And the, the cool thing that I love what Johnny Wendler talks about is how the type of clients that it brought in after they got the marketing piece with all these different elements on it, instead of getting the how much do you charge? Type of phone calls, he was getting, people that were ready to book referred more. And statistically, when you look at any company that's used this type of offer. Piranha marketers, we've all talked about this. Those people that come from a free room offer tend to be in our top 20% of clients that are the highest ticket jobs, the most repeat business, and the most referred or the most refers.

Yeah, look, if you want to catch the very best fish, you gotta fish with very good bait. And only the hungriest fish will snap at the crappiest bait. And that's something Halbert used to say, and this is how I would apply this. So that being said, there's so much more we could talk about, but I just wanted to give the listeners a taste of this and kind of explain to them not only about every door direct mail that they should be doing every day. You know, this is what happens though, when you teach a seminar and then you have to do a podcast episode. I can't even think straight delirious here right now. So, John, if someone wants to have your company do the execution, when should someone hire like you or a company like you versus when should they try to do it themselves? I'm asking the devil's advocate question because I think if you could ever work with someone that can just literally do it for you, it's kind of like, why wouldn't you do that?

Right? Right. Well, every door direct mail, I think the postal service did put out there so that your average small business could go out and do it themselves. But what they find when they, they do it is there's still a lot to it. So you need copy, you need offers.

So in a lot of ways, they're working, collaborating with us.

That's why it works so well between Mailings Unlimited and Piranha Marketing. Because we've got great printing equipment and we're hooked up with the postal service. We get things out quickly. And Piranha's got all this great copy and these strategies that are 20 plus years in the making, and you put those two things together and yeah, that's a different package than what you're going to do yourself. Trying to do every door direct mail. You just scratch your head and say, where am I going to get my copy? What size does it need to be? You know, just so many, so many questions, so many things to do.

Even if you took the piece that we put together here and you go and try to, you know, get it all printed up yourself and take the thing to the mail to the post office, which, you know, they allow you to do, you go and you drop off the every door direct mail piece, etcetera Etc. It's just so much time. And it's like, what's your time worth? You could be making as a business owner, if you're working on your business upwards of 1,000 to $2,000 per hour that you work on your business, or if you're an owner operator cleaning carpets, you're making 150 to $200 per hour that you're operating your business. Why on earth would you go $10 an hour or less work bundling flyers and running them to the post office every couple of weeks? It just doesn't.

If you're doing a really big run, sometimes it's a cost thing because if these are static, not personalized, people will go out and buy 20,000 of them and put them on the shelf and let it last all year. But the trouble is you're not doing a three step program, then you're not doing any personalization. Then for whatever reason, you lost your lease and you moved two doors down. Now all those are on the shelf and they don't have your right address on them, you know, so.

The real secret though, like what you're saying here, the difference of the personalization and combining it is, you know, anything that you can do to improve or ramp up the possibility of it getting responded to is going to increase. When people start seeing pictures of things they own or of themselves or of the neighborhood they're in, or a map from their house to someplace, I mean, those are pretty awesome things you can incorporate into this. Part of it is what's going to give your direct mail the highest possibility of success. Beyond that, even if you could do it yourself, this is kind of like making it automatic. When you just set it up to where a company does it for you, it just gets done, it just gets handled. You're much more likely to work out three times this week if you have a personal trainer who is, you know, already scheduled to come to your home or you meet at the gym at, you know, 8:00am for the next, you know, three days.

Yeah, and any, any, you know, business doesn't matter what it is. But you know, I know service businesses inside and out. And it's like, you know, anytime you can get something automated and running in the background with as little you know, it's like spinning a plate. And the least amount of time you have to spend going back to spin the plate, the better. If that thing's just generating money for you, then you can focus time on the next strategy and you get five or six strategies into place. That's all that. Any of those of us who've used piranhas. Stuff your strategies, Joe. And we put them. That's all that they've ever. 5, 6, 7 strategies that all run automatically like clockwork. And you start growing your business in an exponential way, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Yeah, if you're working it. So why don't we. Well, there's two things we can do. One, if you want to really get involved with this and see the promotion in the campaign, go to richcleaner.com if you're in the cleaning industry and if you are not, but you happen to listen to this and you would like to have John do some stuff for you, give out your website and how people can contact you.

Absolutely. You would think that it was mailingsunlimited.com but it's not. It's growwithmail.com because that's what we want people to do. We want to grow their businesses with mail. So G R O W W I T H M a I l.com and my name is John without an H J O N. And feel free to email me directly@johnjonowithmail.com There you go.

Yeah. One caveat for the cleaners. If you want what we're specifically talking about, it's important that you go to richcleaner.com absolutely. Because if you go to growwithmail.com and start or. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. It just doesn't work.

That's more for people that are outside of the cleaning world. Because our website is general purpose driven. I mean, if you like the things that you heard, you're not a cleaner professional restorer and you're in a different industry and you want to just talk how digital personalized direct mail might impact your marketing, just email me and we'll have a great conversation.

Awesome. Well, there you go. So we wanted to just kind of lay out some different stuff that you can do. Some people that are skilled marketers are aware of this and most are not. And even the ones that are don't leverage it. So we hope that this gives you some food for thought and that you take some action and go leverage this and then please share with us your results because we would love to hear that this podcast and this sort of knowledge is valuable to all of our listeners. And because we provide this as a free service on the podcast, then I would like you to support us by giving us money. And the best way to do that is to implement what it is we teach. Make yourself some money. And then you're really not giving us anything. All you're doing is a tiny little bit of those profits that are totally made because of listening to us babble. Me, especially today, babble. Then you're all good. So, thank you, everyone.