Joshua Nelson shows digital marketing agencies how to reach plumbing and HVAC contractors using direct mail packages with sales letters and books, followed by quarterly newsletters and monthly webinars on CDs. The strategy works because tradespeople prefer physical media on the job site, and repeated touchpoints build trust over time.
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Well, hey, this is Joshua Nelson with the Seven Figure Agency, and one of the questions I'm getting from digital marketing agencies pretty consistently is, how do I get my prospects' attention? They've got so many people reaching out to them via cold calling and emailing and dropping in at their office, they just ignore everything, right? It's really hard to get your prospects' attention. So I wanted to share a strategy that's worked pretty well for us over the years, which is rather than just being like everybody else, cold calling, sending cold email, hoping that they respond, knowing that, you know, they've got so many messages bombarding them on a daily basis. Why not figure out a way to stand out? Why not figure out a way to arrive a little bit differently? And so what we've done over the years is we've put together like bulky mail packages that have worked pretty well. So I mean, in these bulky mail packages, we've got, you know, strong sales message in the, in the, um, in a sales letter type format. We include a copy of our book. And that way, you know, you think about it, you get so many emails that you just ignore it. But how often are you getting something in the mail these days? Quite a bit less, right? And so this is a great way to kind of break the preoccupation of your prospects and get their attention so that when you do call, they're a little bit more receptive to that conversation. Now to take it to the next level, you don't want to just send the direct mail once. You want to kind of be sending things on an ongoing basis. And so this is hard to do if you're just kinda spitfire shooting after anybody you can get, but if you've got a clear audience, right, you've kind of identified you're gonna work with, in our case, plumbing and HVAC contractors, and then you join the national association and you've got a list of the top plumbing and HVAC contractors across the country, and maybe you narrow that down to what Chet Holmes has always referred to as their Dream 100, Narrow it down to somewhere between 100 and 1,000 top prospects that you'd really like to work with. Send them an introductory package like this, and then send out a newsletter on a consistent basis, on a quarterly basis. Now our team has done an awesome job, you know, improving this over the years, but this is something we send out once a quarter to our clients, to our top prospects, and to the association members that we're actively involved in. And we just kind of, we unpack success stories, We share some of the articles that have been posted on our blog, and we put things that we've put out on webinars, right? I always talk about doing webinars on a consistent basis. Kind of infuse that into our newsletter. And the idea really is to become omnipresent in our top prospects' world. So yeah, we show up at the event and they see us there. Yeah, we send them a cold email and they see that in their inbox. Yeah, we send them the newsletter. Now that's showing up in their mailbox. Eventually they start to hear from us enough, they start to see us enough that it's not as hard to get their attention. Hopefully this kind of opened your mind to some ideas and some ways you can leverage other media to get in front of your ideal clients and your ideal prospects. The one last thing I'll say that's worked really well for us is in addition to sending the newsletter is taking our webinars, I talk about doing a webinar every single month on a specific topic, burning that to CD and sending it out with a simple letter and a PDF. That way, yeah, you've emailed them the webinar, "Hey, go here and check it out," but for your top prospects, send it out via CD as well. I find at least in the blue-collar trades, a lot of them are driving from job to job. They won't watch a DVD, they probably won't open up on their smartphone and play, but if you send them a CD with the audio piece of it, a lot of times they'll put that in. And when you've done it enough, you can move from they've never heard of you, they don't know who you are, to they've heard from you often and they're just kind of maybe even a little bit irritated, to they know you, they like you, they trust you, and they're ready to hire you. So post your comments below. We'd love to hear how you're going to start to leverage direct mail in your agency, and I'll talk to you soon.
