The One About Postcards From The Car - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #75

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

And look at us, we're back in the car.

This is a. This is the second, like, car episode we've done.

It's the second car cast. That was one of the favorite episodes where we did the car cast on naming things.

Yes. So what, what are we gonna do today? Postcards.

Yeah, let's talk about postcards, because that's been coming up a lot lately and I don't think we've ever really talked about it.

You know, the beauty of direct ma and the beauty of offline advertising. And you need to quit coughing while we're doing this carcast, okay? I told you not to smoke cigars while we do this. Anyway, he's not smoking cigars. Just in case anyone would possibly think that. All right, well, here's the thing. I was, you know, I was talking to Brendan Bouchard the other day, and I've been running some offline advertising and you know, the July issue of Success magazine has, you know, three different ads for me. Right.

And that's essentially a giant postcard that you've got inside. The is essentially a jumbo postcard.

Right. And so anyway, the reason I bring that up is that I've been talking to a lot of my very smart marketing colleagues, that many are just brilliant online advertisers that know stuff that I don't even know. I mean, but they know, but they.

Don'T do a thing offline.

Yeah, Nothing about postcards or sales letters or even like advertising. And it's amazing to me that how much people don't look at this gigantic opportunity that is available to everyone and they don't add it to their mix of sequencing and other methods. So do you want to start or you want to go with where's like the jumping off point here?

Well, you know, I think that there's so many different ways to use postcards. But let's talk about the before unit first because there's a lot of great things we can do in the after unit with postcards too. But let's talk about the before unit because I really look at it as one of the lowest cost, highest yield, lead generating things that you can do. You know, for years we've used in real estate, especially used postcards to get people to raise their hand and then take them online and do the rest of the follow up sequence online.

Well, we're gonna pause that for a moment because there's a call coming in from. Oh, my God, the Preston.

Okay, we'll be right back.

All right, we are back. And that was actually Dean's wife. I wasn't really the president, but the.

President of the company.

Yeah. All right, so there we go.

So, yeah, from a lead generation standpoint, I mean, doing things that get people to identify themselves is really the most powerful thing you can do on a postcard. And one of the mistakes that I see people make with postcards is trying to do too much on the postcard. They try and make the sale on the postcard. And I think that there's something really powerful when you can just use the postcard to compel people to identify themselves and then use the next profit activator to educate and motivate them to want to meet you. So it really lends itself to making all cheese offers. You know how we talk about more cheese, less whiskers? A lot of times people want to kind of use the postcard to set people up for the sale. Like, it feels like they want to get people primed that they're going to the site to buy something, rather than just focus 100% on their selfish desire on the cheese for them, offering them something in exchange for them going to identify themselves to raise their hand. The best example, the one we use most frequently, and there are probably 100,000 or more of these postcards going out every single month from people all over the country offering homeowners the current month report on Winter Haven house prices. And we go narrow even into lakefront house prices. So we send a postcard every month offering people the free June 2012 report on winter Haven lakefront house prices. And that doesn't say anything about list your house with Julie Matthews or call Julie Matthews and start packing. It's all about getting into the conversation that's already going on in their mind about how much is my house worth? Because that's the thing that people really want to know when they start the process of selling their house. And for every single business, for every single category, there's some trigger thought that is prominent in the mind of your prospect that if you can tap into that and make an offer to them, that's going to make it easy for them to get that information while at the same time identifying themselves to you so that now you can educate them, give them all the information that they need, and motivate them to take the next step by offering them the cookies that we talk about the next step offers.

Have you ever tried just sending out a postcard that says it's Julie Matthews. Start packing.

You see these all the time. It's like they say, thinking of selling, call Julie Matthews and start packing. Or there's other ones I've seen worth a picture of the realtor up on top of the roof of the house where it's got a picture of their. Thinking of selling your house, call Julie Matthews and she'll get right on it. Like all these, I mean, the whole. The play on words. She'll get right on it. And up on top of the roof of the house, it's like all these things are. So the focus that these people have is to try and make themselves famous instead of making themselves rich. Making yourself rich is putting your own selfish desires aside and focusing only on the desires of the people that you want to reach.

Now, you know what I'm half tempted to do here, Dean? Because what are we driving right now? This area in Toronto.

Where are we? So we are in Halton Hills and it is beautiful and green and rolling hills.

And I always want to videotape this while I'm holding the recorder while you drive. This is like crazy. Let me see if I can do this for everybody. Okay, let's see. I'll put me in here. I'm going to reverse this. Now I look super white because of the sun, so the lighting is really weird here.

You really do look white. You look like a vampire.

Well, I mean, it's like a bright shining sunlight on me.

Yeah.

Okay, here we go. All right. And we're gonna include this. We're gonna include this video during the I Love marketing episode. Here's Dean. Over here's the little mini recorder that I'm holding in my hand. And we have a guest in the backseat, but we'll keep her hidden for now.

Okay.

She's famous. All right. And well, you know, now we passed like what I thought were the beautiful areas. This is still cool and everything, but we had like a stretch. That was pretty awesome.

Yeah.

But we're doing the ilovemarketing.com podcast Car Cast, actually.

Yes.

And that's it. Alright. So I just wanted to capture this beautiful moment right here.

That's called that' multitasking right there. Now we see we got two pieces of content from one thing.

Yeah, I think it's kind of useful to let people peek into how we do these things and what's going on. So. All right. And we're driving in this little BMW MX5 or whatever.

Yeah, this is the fancy. This is the 5 liter x5. It's so cool.

I'm that.

There you go.

I like my Land Rover.

I know you do.

All right, so anyway, okay, back to the postcards.

Yes.

Here's one thing I want to.

You've been writing notes as I've been talking. Yeah.

You know, been reminded of things. I remember the very first full day consultation I ever did with one of my carpet cleaning clients. This must have been within the first year of me selling marketing information. And right out of the gate I did really well. Back then there was no Internet and I was running space ads that would drive people to 25 free recorded messages. Then I would get lists of carpet cleaner and I would send postcards and sales letters to them, driving them to the 25 free recorded message to request free report. Not trying to sell them my program. Not even mentioning my program. Just like you went through the whole example of getting people to self identify themselves, entering a conversation that's in their mind. What is prominent?

Offering them something of value.

Yeah, totally. A free report on how to double their business in six months or less. That's what I was offering. Basically. Like there was one of my clients who really immediately, as soon as she had bought my kit, her and her husband started implementing stuff and they had like immediately run a phone book ad and it was driving people to a free recorded message. And this was back in. This must have been 1995, 1996. And I mean, I really can't remember. It was very early on though, probably within a year, maybe 18 months, months of me having first started offering my marketing packages. Basically they had a successful ad that was literally bringing in five to one and it was time to do another ad in another yellow pages and they were already killing it with this one phone book ad and they thought they could improve it even more. One of the things that we had been testing was if you're ever going to run a space ad in a newspaper or yellow pages or.

Or test it as a postcard, test.

It as a postcard because you can cross test. Try this out as a postcard. Try this out as a postcard. If you're going to go to a list of 1,000 people, 500 get this one, 500 get that one. Whatever gets you the most response, that's obviously the best one. Assuming you're going to a very similar same type of list sort of thing. They had tested their new version of the ad they wanted to run in the yellow pages compared to getting the ad they were currently running as a postcard. They never thought of this before. And what they found was that the one that they were currently running was better, was twice as good.

Yeah, there you go.

But they were able to figure that out with a postcard instead of obligating themselves to a year's worth of advertising that you can't change after you place a phone book ad until that phone book comes out a year later. And so that really, you know, it's funny too is I remember I was actually $1,500 is what I charged them for the day consulting. And like, you know, now I'm like, you know, obviously that's a third of my hour, but basically that was really freaking cool to see them do that. And then I started teaching that to all of the different cleaning clients that I had and showing them, you know, here's how you can actually test it. So. But it's weird. I mean, you go to today 2012, and how many people not only wouldn't even think to do stuff like that, they don't even think to use postcards.

Right.

And it is, you know, we've said this on many episodes in the past. There's less noise in people's mailboxes today than there, you know, obviously was, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. There's a huge advantage. And the question is, what are you going to do about it after you hear us talking about it? So. So our goal here is to kind of clarify some of the how to's and the reasons and the psychology behind it. But my hope is that this week you'll put together a postcard. You'll figure out, like, what you said, Dean, the prominent thought and concern in your prospect's mind. And you will send something out to get them to self identify themselves and raise their hand and say, I'm interested.

Yes.

You know, that's the whole thing too. People really focus on prospects and. I'm sorry, they focus on, I shouldn't say prospects. They focus on buyers and non buyers and they'll go out and they'll try to sell something just to get someone to immediately be a buyer versus, like, you know, there are people that will raise their hand halfway. They'll say like, I'm sort of interested, but you know, I'm not fully interested enough to make a buying decision. But if you can get me a free report, if you can give me information about home listings like your.

Yeah, that's the thing is that, that's where that was a big distinction that I had, was really understanding that it's gonna be okay if you don't try and sell them on the postcard, you know that it's going to be okay. You have to think like a chess master. You have to think three or four moves ahead and know what's actually going to happen. And know that you can let go of your selfish desire first just to get somebody to raise their hand. And then you know that you're going to have subsequent communications that are going to lead them to the next step and the next step and ultimately lead them into a relationship with you.

Yeah. And can I say something like that, too, is that, for one, you're absolutely right. And secondly, what people need to really be aware of is that, how do I best say this? You will lose if you just try to go straight to the sale in most cases. So it's not even just being patient and being, you know, thinking like a chess master. It's like, that's the only way that you can make this stuff work most of the time is you have to do this. The reason many people don't do advertising or don't do postcards or don't do marketing campaigns or say yellow. You know, I would always hear yellow Pages doesn't work. You know, even to this day. Right. You know, I'll hear people say they're obsolete.

We.

We have people running yellow pages in 2012, kicking ass and taking names, and we have people doing direct mail and all these methodologies online offline that people will swear don't work. It's not that they don't work. It's the approach they're using doesn't work. It's like kind of saying, getting a date doesn't work.

Dating doesn't work.

Yeah, dating doesn't work. It's like, well, it depends. Are you asking the right person? Are you a message to Market Match? Think of it this way. Have you ever gone to say, I'm a member of a gym called Lifetime Fitness, and they've got a giant pool indoors and outdoors at this gym. On weekends, families are there with all their kids. They show up and there'll be a little kid sort of event that'll take place at a certain time, and a bunch of kids will get in and they'll take them to a swimming class and playing around in the pool. And I've never watched when it's time for them to say, okay, kids come in the pool. All the kids, like all of them all at once, just immediately jump in the pool, and so do the adults. They. Even though it's probably the fastest way to deal with, oh, it's gonna be cold for a few seconds. Most people still step in. Oh yeah, they walk in slowly and they deal with. Oh, you know, they don't just everyone just, oh, time to get in the pool, let's all jump in. I mean, I've never witnessed that all at once. Except those guys that, guys and gals that, you know, jump in the freezing water. You know, what are they called?

Polar Bear Club.

Yeah, exactly. People don't operate that way in swimming pools. They don't operate that way in responding to marketing campaigns. You know, a lot of times you have to multi step it, right? You have to get their toe in the water and then you put their foot in the water, then you get the. I mean, it's just a process. Selling is not an event, it is a process. If you do it with postcards, you do it with anything. So the best usage of maximum response with postcards and everything else is certainly not even trying to sell them.

It's really to make the difference. The easiest way to describe it is to make sure that the postcard is giving and not taking. And there's a difference and people can tell the difference. Our minds are conditioned to avoid and ignore our advertising, right? Clearly we try and avoid advertising messages. And there's actually a part of your brain called Broca's area, which is this little part of your brain that's whole job is to filter out the unimportant things and to bring to your attention the things that are important. That's why we're driving right now. And if we had to give every single thing in our cycle 100% attention, if we had to give it all equal weight, we wouldn't be able to function because you're so overwhelmed with all of the input that you have. But your mind develops.

Look, a squirrel. A squirrel.

Yeah, exactly. Your mind develops shortcuts to know which things are valuable. That's why you can drive up and down the street and you can see all of these advertising messages and not paying attention to them. But when you, when you see a stop sign, Broca knows that that's important and is going to bring it to your attention. When you look at the way that works, you have to imagine Broca as like the guardian to the doorman into the actual part of your brain that processes information. And when you send out an ad, a postcard that looks like an ad that's got your logo and your name and you're the star of the postcard, then it's really indicating to Broca, hey, this is an advertisement, you don't need to pay attention to this. But when you send out something that looks like a newspaper article, looks like valuable information, and it's starting off with the words free, and it's offering you something, Broca is like, oh, this is. This must be something. Something good. Let's let that in. And you can make that decision based on that.

What you just said is. I mean, we've talked about this before, and everything. What you just said just made me realize the value of guys like me and you. Because our broker is, like, all screwed up. I notice advertising, promotion, and I numb out on things that are probably really important in my life. And I don't. You know, I don't. Yeah, it's funny. I'm sort of curt. I'm opinionated, you know, that sort of thing. Maybe, you know, I mean, I'm more pleasant than you, although I'm a little more sarcastic and stuff. I mean, I think if you would.

Have to add a poll that people would say, you're more pleasant than me.

No, but in all seriousness, think about that. I mean, me and you are constantly noticing how through advertising, promotions. I mean, you know, when we're not recording here and stuff, and we're driving along. How many times have I said, look at that billboard. Look at how.

I know. We talk about this all the time. That's why it doesn't make sense to not record the conversations that we have when we're driving for an hour.

We'd have to do a video cast at one point in time so people can actually see, like, the milk truck in front of us.

We wear, like, helmet cams. Go through the day so people can see what we're seeing.

We could go through the shopping mall and we could have something rigged up. You know, eventually the technology is going to allow us to just literally live. We'll stream it. I can see. You know, I love marketing. You know, several years from now, it will be streaming.

We'll be streaming holograms.

It'll be ridiculous.

Me and you and Tupac.

And if people don't know what he's talking about, you'll have to just do a YouTube search for when they.

Tupac hologram. Yeah.

They brought him back for a live.

Concert, which is brilliant.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you've talked about a little of the psychology of getting it. Delivering the message in a way that gets people to raise their hand and self identify themselves. Now, what about selection of the list?

That's perfect. So there's so many different ways, like, you Know, people say, well, nobody reads their mail and, you know, nobody gets their mail. And I think that's absolute rubbish. You know that.

Is that an English term or a Canadian term or what would it say? It.

It's a nice way of saying bullshit.

Let's tell them the Gary Halbert famous A pal versus bpol. I mean, we've discussed.

That's a great example. And I'll give you an example of the birthday card as an example.

Let's explain the A pal, B pal. So that people voted.

Yeah. So, you know, our friend Gary Halpert, he would say, and this is really kind of profound when you really get it, because it's absolutely true that people sort their mail over the garbage can. They get the mail, they've got the garbage can and they're sorting their mail into the A pile and the B pile and the A pile are all the things that are important or personal, the things that they're going to open first or appear personal, appear personal. And the B pile are things that are clearly junk mail that can be thrown away.

And even if it's not junk mail, if you, if it looks like junk mail, they're going to throw it away.

Exactly.

Or it's not going to get the attention that the other stuff's going to get.

Yes, exactly.

Right.

So, you know, whenever I talk about postcards, you know, I always think about the birthday postcard that we did in Florida. And, you know, these guys had a division, the guys who do all the postcards printing for me, and I do a ton of postcard stuff. They have a division of their company that does birthday prospecting and they would go to restaurants and spas and local businesses and they have the direct feed of all the Experian and Axiom databases. So they know everything about everybody by geography. They can tell you, you can make a list of people who are a certain age with a certain income that own homes, that own pets, that live within a certain zip code, and you can tell when their birthdays are. And so they would put together these lists and send birthday cards, birthday postcards to people who are celebrating a birthday that month. And it's a very good strategy for, for local businesses to get people, you know, within a radius of their business. And most of the time those cards would get, you know, a 5 or 6 or 7% response rate, which is, you know, really good for direct mail. But we did a card that got over 30% response rate. 32% of the people that got this card went to a personalized URL to find out what it was all about. And the difference that we did was focusing it 100% on cheese, on looking like a personal thing that was celebrating their birthday. So rather than sending them a postcard that would have, I mean, the most successful card they had was the Hooters card. It had some Hooters girls on it. And it would say, Joe, come party with us on your birthday. And you could go to birthdayooters.com joepolish and download a gift card to come. And that card would get 7 to 8% response every time they mail it. And then so we did a card that didn't have any kind of commercial intention on the front of the car card, but it looked like a birthday card. It looked like I had their designer draw a, draw a picture, an illustration of what looked like an office party. You know, a bunch of people standing around a table with a birthday cake with a banner that said Happy Birthday Joe. Because with all the new advances now in digital printing, you can use digital variable printing and put your name, you can make it look like a completely customized card. So it would say Happy Birthday Joe on a big banner on the front of the card.

And that's the key. And you said personalized URL. Explain what that means.

Personalized URL is that when you use a URL and add an extension Joe polish where now you can go. And that's carried on. So that website is only for you. It's a personalized URL is what pearl stands for.

And people could actually do that with their website if they set it up obviously. Right. With the database. Like ilove marketing.com johnsetta exactly.

There's different people who do all of that. It's pretty easy to set up. There's people who can do that whole turnkey thing for you postcard printers that can do that same thing. Like the guys that I work with in Sarasota.

Yeah, well, let me mention something too. I want to point this out as you still going through this because this is great. See, the reason you get a 32% response when you first did that mailing was because of the multi steps here. This is what I want people to understand is that if you get that marketing is a multi step process in many cases, not that you want to just add steps, just to add steps. I mean, because frankly all of us, me and Dean included, would love to have the least amount of steps to get to where we want. You know, the least amount of step, like marketing is the quickest path to the sale. However, sometimes if you don't have multiple steps, you're never going to make a sale.

Right.

So what I want people to understand is that if you're willing to learn and understand and do these things, this gives you such a huge advantage, not only to have your marketing and your advertising be successful, but your competitors never figure this stuff out. They don't know that, oh, you should get people to raise their hand and self, identify, not just try to sell something direct. I mean, that was the big shift that how I transformed the cleaning industry for, you know, and we're talking a small percentage because even to this day, with the most successful campaigns in the world for selling carpeted upholstery cleaning services that I pretty much have invented most of them 20 years ago, the vast majority of the carpet cleaning industry still don't use them because they're unwilling to actually learn. They may hear about it, but they don't test it. They're like, oh, let's really see if sending out a request for a consumer awareness guide or driving someone to a free recorded message or go watch a consumer awareness video on YouTube that's linked to this website. They don't do stuff like that. The point is, everything here is not just write a postcard and pick a good list. That's part of it.

But then think through what's going on in their mind. And I think that the reason that that postcard worked so well is because it is around somebody's birthday, people start to get more sort of hyper vigilant about what's happening in the mail, that they're expecting that birthday card from Aunt Doris with the $10 in it, or they're expecting to see who's gonna remember their. Who's gonna remember their birthday. And even if they're not u the person that gets the mail, you know, because only one person in a household usually goes and gets the mail. But when they come home, the mail is laid out right, like so in our house. So Courtney gets the mail, but she lays it out. She's got my pile and Sony's pile and then the catalogs and all the, you know, she does the sorting into the A pile and the B pile kind of thing. So if I came home and it was my birthday, on the top of my A pile would be this postcard. Happy Birthday, Dean. Right. So now there's no indication that this is any kind of a commercial message. It's just happy birthday, Dean. Then you turn the card over and there's a little one of the guys is their face there with a Dialogue box. I'll put this up on. I love marketing, but there's a little dialogue box in courier font. I wanted this to look like something that somebody would. That the office would have gotten together and done for you on your birthday. So the little message says, happy birthday, Dean. We all got together and got you something super terrific, J. That's all it said. And then the pearl, you'd go to bigbirthdaysurprise.com dean, and it would be a personalized website. Now, the only thing on that card, our only intention and the question that they asked me was, how can we get more people to go to that pearl? How can we get more people to go there? So the only thing that we focused on was getting them to go to that website. Because if you're. And I'm honestly shocked that there are 68% of the people who got that postcard who were. Who did not go to that pearl. I mean, it kind of like they had a little pool at the. At the postcard place. They had a little pool on what kind of response it would get. And the highest on the thing was like 12%, you know, but I had that. 25 was. I had on the pool. Right.

Was there money exchange?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Illegal gambling?

Yeah. No, no, there was no illegal gambling. It was just this. It was for pride. Bragging rights. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Are you saying that because this is.

Being recorded just in case this is being recorded? Yeah.

I mean, really, I don't want to be doing a free podcast with a criminal.

I gotcha. So the. So anyway, when it got up to over 30% and it got, you know, it did it consistently over 30. And the only purpose of it was to get people to go to the pearl. Now, when they got there, one of the ones that we did was for.

Cafe Latte, he just hit the recorder. So if you actually hear a big boom, that was like Dean getting so excited.

I do get excited.

He smashed his fist into my mini recorder.

I do get excited about it.

You need to kind of calm down here a little. Just talking about postcards.

So we had the. So when they went there, we had that image, you know, that the graphics and stuff that looked just like the. Just like the other. Just like the postcard. But it was like, you know, it was a happy birthday message from Cafe Latte and telling them how, you know, we're celebrating your birthday all month at Cafe Latte, and you can get free coffee every day for your birthday month, and you just bring in this, you know, best birthday ever. Free coffee card for cafe latte. And that was like a really easy next step because you got to remember all you're doing is engineering the sequence. You got to think about it like a three act play almost. You're not going to reveal in Act 1 what the big finale is in Act 3. You just talk about all they need to know to get to the next level.

Level.

So when somebody, when you're sending a postcard, the only objective you have is to get somebody to go to the website. And when they get to the website, the only objective is to get them to leave their contact information or to download the gift card or to do whatever the next logical step is, you know.

Yes, I totally hear you.

So it was kind of, it's kind of an exciting thing to see when, even when people say, well, nobody open, nobody pays attention to mail anymore, yet we got 32% of everybody that we sent that card to to actually log on and go to a website. And that's pretty spectacular. When you think these are people, you have no idea who they are randomly, you know, just because they had a birthday that month, you got them to take some action.

You know what's funny though about this? When people say this won't work, or my business is different or my clients are different, or this, you know, no one pays attention to this. A long copy doesn't work. You know, we've heard that a million marketers are always having to address that sort of stuff. And I just thinking out loud here to myself that when someone says something so idiotic, you know, I often wonder if they could ever be turned around. Because, you know, you do hear that a lot. We do address it. But like when someone.

I've tried direct mail. That doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah. When someone really says that, I mean, you know, it's almost like if you're listening to this podcast, which if you weren't, you wouldn't hear what I just said, would they? That wouldn't make any sense.

Right. So ignore that.

If you're listening to this and you have people that have maybe suggested you listen to this and you happen to have the mindset that this doesn't work, or direct mail doesn't work, I would really encourage you to not only eradicate that nonsense from your head, but really go overboard in trying to remove that delusional sort of belief system from your mind because it is one of the biggest inhibitors for success with marketing. It becomes, you know, self fulfilling prophecy. When someone believes something won't work, they will literally take actions to figure out, you know, how to make sure they do things in a way to where it does not work or they'll test something once and they'll have a failure with it. They'll be like, ah, this just doesn't work. And they don't go back and analyze what happened and why. And that's the thing that's really important to share too because you know, we share all of these strategies and methods and thoughts. You rarely are going to mail a postcard once and all of a sudden you're going to get a 32% response. Now with the advice that you've given Dean and putting the postcard up at I love marketing, which is something that you didn't just think through in one day.

No, this is the kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Now I can do it much faster because I'm able to channel the mind of who it is that we're going to. You know, and there's so many different ways to use postcards like this and use data, you know, I mean there's so many great lists available now. And I just think like they're cheaper.

Than they used to because people, I mean this business is really struggling. I mean because all the of all of this interest and direction and focus which used to be in offline advertising is now in the online world. People don't just make individual stupid decisions to quit taking advantage of things. Entire companies and organizations, departments that oversaw the generation of money and leads into organizations, all of a sudden got sold on the fact that oh, this doesn't work anymore. You've got to be online. I mean, how many people that spend. I will just say this. I mean if people were to take 110 of the focus that they put in social media and trying to figure out how to make social media work and directed 10% of that energy into like a postcard campaign, it's scalable too. What they would do would probably 10 times what it is they're doing with their social media account if they scaled it.

I agree 100%.

So anyway. All right, so what would people. Cuz I. I don't know. We going to do a full episode here.

I got so much things I want to talk about.

Oh my God, Dean, I just. You're going to hate me. You know, when we were doing the thing, I never put it back on record. On record. The whole. Yeah, I'm just messing. See, I was trying to. I was trying to punk him live.

Oh, that's so funny.

Yeah. For a minute though, you started looking off the start I wish I would have had a camera that your eyes are getting all bugged out. You're like, oh, my God, we just lost an I love marketing episode.

That's so funny. You know, so one of the things like birthdays is a. Is a great thing. So I think if you own a local. If you own a local business, that's. That's a win. Because people, especially if you own things that could be wrapped around, like celebratory things like going to a spa or going to a restaurant or something like that, it's fantastic. Great opportunity.

When you say celebratory things, like if you literally go online and just type out all of the holidays for the year and just print that out and put it up on your wall next to. Hopefully you have some sort of visual marketing calendar on the wall that you see a real one that you actually write on. Not one online, not one that everyone can shoot, but literally, whoever is the rainmaker, decision maker in your world that brings in business, you need a real visual calendar. And next to that, put holidays or every type of event related to your.

Industry that's kind of going on that there's some momentum that you can tie into what you do. Yeah, there's. So that's an incredible thing. Now, you know, another opportunity that is, you know, really great for postcards are new movers, people who move into a neighborhood. I know you must have done stuff like that with the carpet.

Oh, we did all the time. I have carpet cleaners that are buying a list of new homeowners, and they're mailing consistently every 12 to 18 months after someone, first off, they'll do a congratulations for moving into your home. If you ever need, blah, blah, blah, put people on their newsletter list. But then they have the campaigns that it's been 12 months since you've been in your home. Now it's time to get the carpet cleaning. It's 18 months and it's consistently done.

Yes.

And people are like, wow. Because it's personalized and it gives a specific reason, not just get your carpets clean, but get your. See the mirror act of saying get your carpets clean because it's been 12 months is different than hiring a carpet cleaner.

Right.

I mean, people.

It's like somebody paid attention, right. And then they start thinking, yeah, well, it is 12 months or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you can get lists of new movers, people who have just moved into a new home. You can divide it up by income, you can do whatever and, you know, and an offer something that's going to get them to raise their hand. There's some, it's pretty high probability stuff. When somebody's moving into a new area. They've got a lot of relationships that they need to re establish. Certainly a carpet cleaner, certainly. Any healthcare professionals? I've got a friend who owns a veterinary hospital actually Julie Matthews, husband, owns a vet clinic and they were talking about just doing some new mover postcards. So I got all the information for them. But let's talk about maybe what he could do so we can give some ideas for him there. If I were looking at that, I know that certainly some of the people, I forget what the percentage, but more than half of people have, have some kind of a pet in their home. Do you know what the numbers are? Actually?

You know what, I really don't know.

It's pretty high though. Either cats or dogs.

Right. What about rats, gerbils, amphibians, snakes?

Snakes, all that kind of stuff?

Yeah. Ferrets, potbelly pigs.

So if I were doing that, you.

Ever thought of getting a pot bellied pig?

I've thought about it a lot actually. More than you would think that a guy like me would think about that.

Right?

Yeah. But I've decided against it.

Okay.

Yeah.

And begin.

So what would you do? So you're, you own a veterinary hospital.

Right.

And you get a list of new movers.

Yep.

And you want to mail a postcard to them. Now what we, you know, typically what we do with new movers is mail at least three postcards, you know, once every 30 days for the, for the first three months to get them to raise their hand.

First off, I would create. Well, there's several things, but one that just pops into my mind and I'm not saying this is the best strategy in any particular order because it's like rattling off things.

Yeah. So I mean I want people to.

Hear how we brainstorm to choosing a veterinarian.

Okay. So what did you call it?

The new New Homeowner's guide to choosing a Veterinary.

So you use some kind of consumer awareness guide.

Yeah. Or you know, free recorded messages reveals how to choose the best veterinarian. When you're brand new in an area, something like that, you drive them to a free recorded message or you drive them online. You test it, you test it with a real toll free number, a free recorded message and people ask, well, where do you get these free recorded messages? Well, there's a lot of different services. You can do a search.

You go to ilovemarketing.com right on the Right side of the website there's a link to free recorded hotlines, the service that Joe and I use.

Yeah, yeah. Which we use this ourselves. We recommend them. They're very inexp and they understand this sort of marketing. So obviously the wisdom there. So I would do a combination of. I would have both really. You have a free recorded message and I would test them, see which one. And I would also drive them to your website or send an email in order to have this sent to you.

And that's the thing. It's very interesting. We talk about response mechanisms. I think people downplay or unpleasant underestimate the value of just saying send an email to. You can get a Gmail account set up and use that as a URL. You use the thing. I do that all the time.

Well, let me mention that too. And here's why. People come up with every kind of bullshit excuse in the world as to why they can't do marketing. Because they don't have a website set up or they don't have a landing page. And frankly, if you don't know how to set up websites. I don't know how to set up websites. I mean, I pay people to do this stuff.

You got people for that?

Yes. There are individuals in the world that.

They do that, do that. Yeah.

And that. Paint the roads and you know all this. See that, that little elevator company, we're driving through the city now and there's like a construction thing. Anyway, people do stuff. But the thing is, is like people will come up with reasons as to why they don't do marketing. And you know, Dan Kennedy would always have this funny saying is don't let logistics dictate marketing. He would get so pissed. When you go into companies, they're like, oh, we don't have the resources. We'll set up a freaking free Gmail.

They're making decisions based on logistics and not logic. They use that all the time.

Right, right. And so basically, yeah, I would do that. I would start with, even with all the other things that we'll talk about, that is a just a given. I mean, create some sort of consumer information. I always deep default to that. The reason being is when someone has to sit and teach someone how to make an informed, intelligent decision. The strategic byproducts of sitting down and writing that consumer awareness guide or that free report or recording that message or setting up, recording a video that's going to teach a new homeowner how to do it. What you are doing is creating copy and repurposable content that can be used in all of the other formats, be it surveys or whatever else it is that you do. Another thing new to the area, here are the five biggest frustrations people have when trying to find the right veterinarian. It's like, well, who's putting that out? Is that from a veterinarian? Is that from a survey? So you can do a combination of something to really play off of that.

So I thought. I thought immediately about the Consumer Awareness Guide or some kind of a guide like that. But my thought would be it would be interesting to test these approaches, you know, to come up with something here. But my approach might be to send something to the pet. So make the postcard have come from a pet spokesman, from the. You know, from. From the vet clinic.

All right, wait, we're gonna do another video here, and Dean's gonna explain. Okay, so here we are. We're doing a video on this bright light on us. But we see all these companies. Dean, over here. What do they pay for that? What is going on here?

Yeah, those are like billboards, but they're like, on the side of the hill. They're in flowers. They're like, there's a Deloitte one, there's a United Way one.

And we just passed. Well, there was a whole slew of them back there. And we're recording an I episode.

I mean, they're like billboards.

They're like postcards.

They're like billboards.

What do you think they pay for those things?

Probably about five to $10,000 a month.

Okay. I wonder if they're doing postcard campaigns like we're talking about on this episode.

I think they should be.

Yeah. What episode is this, by the way?

This is our Diamond Jubilee episode. 75 episodes together.

This is our 75th anniversary of I Love marketing. And we're talking about postcards.

Yeah. For the first time.

For the first time in depth. And you're going to put up on the website, which I think is really an amazing thing for people. You're going to put up the birthday promotion and campaign so people can actually get a model. I'm still looking at this video, thinking how bright I look. Almost angelic, because the sun is so bright on me right now. So anyway, if you're watching this video and you haven't listened to episode number 75, go there now and do the that. And you're going to hear mostly Dean, because when he's driving, he loves to talk.

I love to talk.

Okay, I'm going to turn this off now. Go to Ilovemarketing. Dot com. Now, I wanted to point out to our listeners because they're thinking we're just interrupting this broadcast in order for me to do a commercial. But we are. Think about it. The actual interruption of the broadcast is a commercial, and it's part of the episode, too. How often do you actually see commercials being part. I mean, it does happen here.

Production placement.

Yeah. All right, so continue on.

So, okay, so here's the thing. I had this idea about sending, you know, choosing like a pet spokesperson for the. For the vet clinic. Right. And sending. Having a dog and a cat, because you don't know for sure whether they have. But you have a dog and a cat spokesperson. You send the postcard in language that's speaking to the pet. So it's not speaking to the owner of the. Of the pet. You're speaking to the pet and you're offering them the, you know, the. The Pet's Guide to Lake Wales. And you have like a, you know, almost like the COVID of a magazine or the COVID of a guide that has, you know, all the best places for pets in Lake Wales, where, you know, you talk about the best places to go and run, you know, the best places to go and meet other pets and maybe invite them to join, you know, the Pet Society of Lake Wales or something like that. Like, you're. They're the representatives of all the pets, and they want you. Now that you're a new pet in the area, they want to kind of welcome you to the neighborhood.

That is fun.

I think that might be a pretty cool. That might be a pretty cool thing. And if you had. When they went to the website, you could even have a video that's dubbed where it's, you know, the. The dog and the cat talking to the actual pet, welcoming them to welcome them to Lake Wales. And we hope to, you know, see you at the dog park kind of thing.

We should have carpet cleaners, like, have dust mites talking to each other. Absolutely.

Well, there's some kind of fun stuff like that.

Well, no.

Okay, so let me. I think that's a pretty fun idea.

No, no, it is. Here's what I want to say to that. And for what? One, I'd love to have any of the people that are listening actually test this out and be creative, because, you.

Know, let's get Mike to test it out, because I know they want to do some thing. I'll tell Julie to tell Mike to listen to this episode.

Who is Mike? Who are you talking about?

Mike Matthews. I was telling you, Julie's husband is a, is a veterinarian.

Okay. You know, I'm not paying attention.

You really aren't.

I pipe in every once in a while.

Disrespectful.

Try to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

About.

Okay, no, but here's what I'm saying. You know how people can take things like this and they can get so cutesy that it's not going to work at all. This is not about being.

No, I'm not saying. Yeah, absolutely.

I want to make that distinction though, because people can go down a completely wrong path and say, oh, you know.

But you got to have the purpose for it. And the purpose is to get somebody to go and download or to go to that website to get this, you know, And I think there's probably something to that about speaking to the pet and assuming. Because you're not going to know with new movers for sure whether they actually have a pet. Although you can get lists. I had those postcard guys run a list of like in the, within five miles of the vet hospital, there are, you know, three, three thousand something confirmed pet owners. So you can mail to that list specifically, but you'd mail something different when you know for sure that there's a pet there. But when you're mailing the new movers, you don't know. But you should always assume that there is, you know, like if you're going to somebody, you're going. And this applies to any business you only speak to. The five star prospects don't even allude to the fact that, well, if you own a pet or if you have a pet, just assume that they do and speak directly to those people because that's the only one that matters, you know?

Well, you know, there's also a point I want to, because I don't want to forget to say this on this episode is that with postcards, because of the ease and quick that you can get them out, the lower postage rate, it's actually a great way to clean your list. Also, what I mean by cleaning your list is actually finding out who's responsive, who's not, who's moved, who hasn't moved, that sort of thing. Before someone spends a lot of money dumping an expensive direct mail campaign on their list, they may want to make sure they got the cleanest list, change of ad, all of the things to do in order.

Yeah, because you send a postcard and you're going to get back the nixies, you're going to get back the undeliverables or Change of address or whatever. Yeah. And it cost you 50 cents or less to do that.

You know, I'm just thinking out loud here. We can add this to the list of future episodes where we actually do a episode, either just on the power of a list and how to go deeper with selecting the list. But maybe we even get one of our buddies who's a list expert online and offline and just talk with them about it.

I can get these postcard guys on because they do so many different things.

Yeah, maybe we should, because I think a lot of people here are definitely. At least the smart ones, are definitely excited about this, and we've opened up a lot of potential opportunities for them. But now it's like, okay, what do we do and how do we do it? If there was a service, like, you know, a lot of people have thanked us for making the free recorded message thing, but, you know, it's really doing more of a, you know, recommended thing. And Dean actually is pulling out. I'm going to tell everyone where we're at. We're at a parking space. We're going to go to. We're going to Strategic Coach to meet with Dan Sullivan and the whole marketing team. And I'm going to do some recordings with Dan for a new podcast that we're doing called 10 times talk, and that's going to be on Genius Network. And so we're going to be brainstorming with them for a little bit. And so we just pulled over here, and Dean is handing our mysterious guest, who's just stepped out to pay for this. And he's got a hello Kitty wallet.

Yeah, of course.

And, you know, another video that we can share. Dean, I know there's a lot of videos, maybe not all on this episode, but where I actually gave you the hello Kitty blanket.

Yes.

At a recent platinum meeting as a birthday gift. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, you did. It's very sweet of you.

Okay, we've only got a few minutes left, so I want to kind of leave everyone with sort of the best place to go and what to do. And one thing I do want to mention is that I've heard this years ago, and I've always found this to be great, useful, powerful advice. Send 10 letters or postcards a day, personalized. We actually think of who your sphere of influence is and literally handwrite them and give people an opportunity to hear from you. People that are not just business, but personal relationships, you know, stay in touch with people. So many people do not do this anymore. They don't, you know, and the power, you know, if you say to someone, I love you, I love you 10 times a day, it doesn't seem to have the impact that if you, you.

Know, put it in writing.

Well, not just put it in writing. Yeah, well, that helps too. But, you know, it's like people hardly say anything anymore in print. People don't mail postcards or stuff to people. And so basically what my recommendation is, is that you get your sphere of influence, the most important vendors, joint venture partners, people along those lines. And see, our mysterious guest is slamming the door here.

Oh, shit, I'm going to get another credit card. I'll take American Express.

Oh, see, it's your fault then, huh?

It is.

Okay, you bring up a good point.

Because one of the things that is valuable is even if you're going to do a new mover campaign or a birthday campaign or something like that, is syndicating it where you can do.

You.

Know, for instance, what we were doing with the birthday people is getting a collection of people together to put up four or five gift cards for people. So it said we all got together and got you something and you're mailing, splitting the cost of that mailing. And when they come to the site, they get to download four or five different gift cards. And it may be the same thing with this, with the vet clinic. If you did the, you know, the Pets Guide to Lake Wales, maybe there are other businesses that would be complementary but non competitive, that would be, you know, somebody who does pet grooming or pet boarding, which maybe they do all those things together at the, at the clinic too. But pet food or pet, you know, all those different kind of things, pet sitting, somebody all get together and include that in the consumer awareness guide.

Yep. All right, so this is awesome. So why don't we wrap up and tell people about the business breakthrough?

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, here we go.

We've only got a few minutes left here. And people have been given some great advice here. What I recommend this week. If you really could just take five days out of the next seven days and mail 10 postcards a day to important people just saying, hey, hello, thank you. It might be a client that you just want to say thanks for the referrals. It might be someone that you have an opportunity you want to present to them. It might be a family member that you want to just say, I love you and I think you're awesome. Just get yourself in the habit of mailing out some postcards. And also, Dean, you may want to drive up to Strategic Coach headquarters. So we can drop off our luggage and not have to lug it down the street and then come back here. See, this is, I'm having to like, you know, a logistical.

And that is brilliant.

While we are driving through a parking lot and we've got luggage. That's brilliant because I don't live here. I live in Arizona and I got my luggage.

That is brilliant.

And I'm staying with Dan and Babs tonight. They have a couple of homes and they're awesome. So, anyway.

Okay, that's a good idea.

All right, so business breakthrough.

Okay, so we're doing now, starting on July 15th, our breakthrough DNA blueprint program.

And if you heard this episode after July 15th, that doesn't mean you can't do this.

Right? Exactly. We're just starting, we're launching on July 15th leading up to the I Love Marketing conference in October.

October, 3rd, 4th, 5th, which you need to mark that on your calendars. The most important three days of the entire year.

Absolutely. In Phoenix. Beautiful Phoenix.

It's actually nice during that period of time. It really is.

So here's what we want to do is we want to use this opportunity, we've got 10 weeks after starting on July 15th, to go through a 10 week breakthrough blueprint program and go really deep in the eight prophecies activators and create some breakthroughs, some case studies that we can brag about at the conference in October. So what we're going to do, because we just want to work with a handful of people leading up to that, that we can, you know, give some personal attention to, doing some Q and A calls with Joe and I. There's a whole curriculum that you'll be going through with some exercises and homework, and we'll be working on your samples and actually creating marketing pieces there. And we're going to do this program. The Breakthrough Blueprint program is free when you register to attend the conference in October. So we're not charging any more to go through the Breakthrough blueprint program. It's $997 is the early bird price to come to the I Love Marketing conference. And you get to go through this Breakthrough Blueprint program with us starting on July 15th for the whole 10 weeks. So we're very excited about that. We've been shooting some videos over the last couple of days and getting all ready for that. And I think we're gonna have some incredible breakthroughs between now and when the conference actually starts.

And it will be so incredible that at the conference we're going to have Lou Ferrigno as One of our special guests, Incredible Hulk. There's gonna be a lot of business breakthroughs. It's gonna be awesome. So watch the videos@ilove marketing.com we'll also post a couple of these other nonsensical videos that I recorded while we're driving.

Around and some postcards samples. This is a big week over@ilovemarketing.com if you normally just listen on itunes, this is the week to go over and check out ilovemarketing.com because you get to see all of the samples that we've been talking about and see these videos.

Yeah, exactly. And so on behalf of myself and Dean just passed the hour mark. We are right there. This is perfect if we have to do any crazy editing, which I doubt we will. So thank you for listening to I love Marketing. And if you are someone that has listened to every single episode of I love marketing, all 75 episodes, please comment on ilovemarketing.com underneath this episode and let us know. I know we've got a lot of loyal fans. I know we've got a lot of people that are running meetup groups all over the world for I love Marketing. And we just really appreciate how this has grown into a movement in tens of thousands. Thousands of people all over the world are benefiting from this. And so thank you very much, and we hope you found this valuable, and we'll talk to you on the next episode.

Awesome.