I have talked about direct-mail being “the next big thing.” Yes, the Internet continues to be a profitable media that you must embrace. But if you look for a media-commonality in all the people in my coaching groups and that I work with privately who make $500,000.00 to $1-million and more per year, it is their constant, frequent, aggressive, innovative and masterful use of direct mail. Neglect it at your peril.

Other points I made include diversification in customer acquisition and niche-ing. And, you’ve seen me nagging relentlessly about niche-ing. Depending on your business, you might niche in ethnic, subculture, occupation, etc.

Now I wish I could give you the exact examples, but I promised a VIP Member that I wouldn’t, so I can only tell you that, at my urging, he has ferreted out very, very niched markets and publications to advertise his financial services in, thoroughly modified the ads for each one – and is getting truly ungodly returns on invested ad dollars. His is not the only such example, although he has “got it” better than anybody I’ve seen, really paid attention and gone after this like a starved dog leaping on a slab of beef. And I see lots of Members stubbornly ignoring this.

I’ve laid out strategies that I suggest you pull from your files and review today.

One came about immediately after a couple of meetings. Now I am writing this immediately after two group meetings back to back. And many of these people have grown – and grown their businesses – by leaps and bounds just since our first meeting. One member has successfully implemented continuity programs first discussed only months ago, and is literally transforming his business as result.

I could cite at least a dozen others increasing their incomes by tens of thousands of dollars a month. I am constantly, silently, mentally comparing the people I’m working with who are truly kicking butt and taking names vs. those who aren’t keeping up. What is the difference? It is not knowledge, ability or opportunity. It is grabbing and quickly acting on a strategy….taking massive action….and being willing to work, experiment, even struggle to apply an idea successfully.

I was particularly inspired myself by these meetings – what great groups! W. Clement Stone wrote about “inspiration to action.” Not “inspiration”.

I believe in the John Kerry microphone malfunction about as much as I believe in the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. At first I did, but with a few days’ observation and thought, I concluded Kerry’s mistake was intentional.

It was a way to get a position and statement put forcefully into the market that could not be done simply and straightforwardly.

Not long ago, Gold/VIP Member Jeff Kaller mailed a mountain of postcards driving people to call – the wrong number. Followed by mailings apologizing for and correcting the mistake. And getting better than ever response.

Another client, who shall remain nameless, sent out a sales letter and registration form for a very pricey event to his best customers, with the dates, place and price missing. Nearly 70% called to inform him of his mistakes: some irritated, some trying to be helpful. This put 70% on the phone with his three telemarketers, who closed half during the calls; net 35% registration vs. best ever prior sign-up rate from same customers for comparable events, 15%.

I recently had a client test it with the dollar bill letter…Copy says: “As you can see, I’ve attached a real, crisp, new $1.00 bill to this letter…” However, to 25 of the 50 sent, he attached a $10.00 bill. To the other 25, a $20.00 bill.

Only two called to report he was mistakenly attaching bigger bills, and offered to send theirs back. No one else mentioned it. But response was 4% better than when same letter was sent with the dollar bill attached. What does that mean? Maybe something, maybe nothing.

Joe Sugarman gave discounts and rewards to people who found the most mistakes in his ads. The technical term for this is: involvement.

My “Mr. X” is a gimmick. The contest is a gimmick. Or are these ‘hooks’? A fine line.

In more practical terms, what I mean by “marketing context” is the appropriateness and sensibility of a particular marketing message delivered to a particular target in a particular way.

For example, you should be talking to your current customers/clients/patients differently than you would talk to a cold prospect. When talking to a customer, the context of your relationship allows you to be more informal and personal because of the existing relationship.

With a prospect, the relationship has yet to be created, so the context of the relationship is one of a “warm-up period” where, over time, you allow them to get to know, like and trust you. I always use the analogy of dating. Chances are most people do not ask their spouse to marry them on the first date. There is a courting period, an engagement period and finally marriage.

Let me share a specific example of marketing context and how it relates to day-to-day marketing. My friend and mentor, Bill Glazer, often talks about his most successful marketing piece which was a four-page letter on yellow legal paper and appeared to be hand-written. The piece generated a ton of business and Bill even won an industry award because of its success and uniqueness.

Other marketers see this letter and try to emulate Bill’s success. In particular, I heard about one story where a marketer basically did the same thing Bill did, but got ZERO RESPONSE.

The reason Bill was successful and this other person was not was because Bill understood the context of how to use the handwritten letter, whereas the other person did not. In Bill’s situation, he sent the letter to people who already knew him and knew what he stood for (including some pretty outrageous marketing). The context of the relationship was familiarity and a hand-written letter from Bill was congruent with the relationship.

On the other hand, the marketer who copied the letter, sent it to COLD PROSPECTS! Think about this for a second. You receive a funky-looking, handwritten letter from somebody you don’t know. Does this make sense?

Probably not, which is why his response rate was zero.

I teach people how to improve the attention-grabbing power of their marketing by using copy cosmetics. These are proven techniques to grab attention and keep the reader reading. In the case of Bill Glazer’s sales letter he used several techniques, including simulated handwriting.

Even though I am a huge fan of copy cosmetics there are times when the marketing context dictates I use only a few copy cosmetic techniques. For example, when I create a multi-step, lead-generation direct mail sequence, I tend to use only the basic copy cosmetic techniques like underlining, boldfacing, subheads, etc.

However on subsequent steps, I may use techniques to convey a more informal approach, such has handwritten notes, because I have already started a relationship with the reader. Their use is suitable as the reader starts to get to know me.

You should always be considering the context of your marketing message and consider whether or not it makes sense for your target. Is it appropriate for the current state of your relationship and the situation surrounding it? Most importantly, remember, the context is from the point of view of your target – NOT YOU!

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Mike Capuzzi is a marketing strategist, author and speaker. Since 1998, he has been helping entrepreneurs and business owners improve their marketing and response rates. He also leads over 150 business owners and entrepreneurs within the Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle – Philadelphia Chapter.

There’s no doubt in my mind that any conventional small  business – restaurant, retail store, service station, etc. can easily and inexpensively double it’s business within thirty days with direct mail marketing.

In fact, I want to give you one very simple, cheap strategy that you can use for any such business. It’s a little labor intensive but very inexpensive and very effective. It’s based on the simple idea of credibility coming from the fact that someone you know patronizes a particular business.

Here’s what you do…

1. Get a list of all the names and home addresses of your best customers
2. Get your local criss-cross street directory available at your main library. This directory allows you to take a customer’s address and look up the people who live on either side of that address or across the street from that address.
3. Compile a prospect list from that directory by name and address of the neighbors of your best customers
4. Design a form letter to send to all those prospects that lets you insert the names of the neighbors.

For example, your letter might say:

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Jones,

Did you know that Herb and Barbara Gratitude, your next door neighbors, have been our customers for over a year. It just occurred to me that you might be looking for the same kind of (insert whatever your service or product is) that Herb and Barbara come to us for.

So I’ve enclosed six special coupons made out in your name only for your use.

This strategy will get you business. In fact for every four letters you mail with a really strong offer you should get at least one customer. Each of your customer’s has four eligible neighbors, one on either side, two across the street, so you could double your customer count with just this idea.

The last item in the structure is the close or what most marketers call…THE CALL-TO-ACTION.

The most important thing to remember here is to make response easy. Make it as easy as possible for the person to do what you want them to do. If you want them to come into your store with the coupons tell him that and tell him where your store is. Show a map and give directions, tell them what hours you’re open.

If he is to call tell him what hours he can call and who to ask for. If he’s to fill out a form make it as clear and user friendly as possible. It’s important to learn and adhere to this structure as much as possible in creating your direct mail.

There’s one last thing to keep in mind as you create your direct mail pieces. It’s called emotional logic and selling. It doesn’t matter what your offer is most people will be motivated to respond to it if you are successful in motivating them to respond to it via motions, pride, love, fear, guilt, to name just a few.

Emotional factors control response and buying decisions. Then most people need the logic, facts, figures, and statistics to justify their purchase to themselves and to others. When you write copy you have to consider both the reader’s emotions and need for logical persuasion.

There’s no doubt in my mind that any conventional business – restaurant, retail store, service station, etc. can easily and inexpensively double it’s business within thirty days with direct mail marketing.

1. Telegraph the offer.
2. Emphasis the best aspect of the offer.
3. Target the reader

Now let me explain in more detail exactly what I mean.

An opening that can TELEGRAPH the offer is tricky. It has to convey the offer in a way that heightens desire to learn more rather than lessening the desire to learn more.

For our example let’s assume we’re selling a home cleaning service, a maid service using a letter directed at the homeowner.

We might have a headline that says…

“Never Turn On A Vacuum Cleaner Again As Long As You Live.”

Or how about this headline…

“How To Resign Your Position As Housewife.”

These headlines include the guts of the offer but they don’t really reveal the details.

An opening may focus only on the best feature of the offer. Sometimes that’s price. Sometimes it’s something being given away for free. Sometimes it’s the terms of an especially strong guarantee.

It might be picking up and delivery or some other aspect of the service you offer. In the example we’re working with it might be the credibility of your maid’s service company. We know that will be important to the customer because the customer will worry about having strangers in her home.

So here’s how we could add and EMPHASIZE to the openings we’ve already devised:

“Never Turn On A Vacuum Again As Long As You Live”

Then you can go on to say…

“We’ve shown 6,218 other women how or how to resign your position as housewife.”

The third thing you want to try to accomplish in an opening is to TARGET your reader.

This means that you’ve let your reader know that you know something about them. That you know who they are. That tells them it’s probably worth reading what you have to say.

For our example you might have gotten a list of working women to mail to. In that case we might again modify our opening this way:

“Career Woman and Housewife… Never Turn On A Vacuum Cleaner Again As Long As You Live”. We’ve shown 6,218 other women how to resign your position!!”

If you can accomplish all three things in your opening terrific, if not you must at least accomplish one of them.

The reason it’s difficult is that direct mail is still not an exact science. There are many things we know about direct mail that have been established through scientific testing and statistical analysis but there is still a large portion of the process that relies on the intuition and knowledge of customers of the person creating the piece.

That’s why professional direct mail copyrighters with good track records can command extraordinary fees because it is impossible to identify and duplicate what they do. And even the top pros applying all their talent and experience have losers too.

So I’ll be the first to admit to you that I cannot teach you how to be certain of putting together a successful direct mail piece. I can however, tell you how to tremendously reduce the likelihood of creating an unsuccessful one.

Each piece – the letter, the brochure and the response device – has a structure and the same structure is appropriate for all three. In fact, not only should the same structure be used but you should repeat your entire sales story in all three pieces. Not word-for-word of course but so that the reader could order after only reading the letter not the brochure, or the brochure not the letter, or the order form without reading either the letter or the brochure.

Now this is a real insider’s secret to making direct mail work so do not overlook the importance of this: You can’t control the customer’s behavior.

You can only prepare for as many different variances in customer behavior as possible. The piece of structure starts with an opening.

That opening might be the headline, the first sentence or two of the letter or what’s called a ‘Johnson Box,’ above the start of the copy.

Whatever the opening is it must at least do one of these three things:

1. Telegraph the offer.
2. Emphasis the best aspect of the offer.
3. Target the reader.

I also mentioned that this approach is not full proof and can work against you if the offer inside is relatively ordinary.

That’s one of the reasons that many marketing experts prefer the billboard option for most small business to consumer offers and for most to consumer mail order offers.

A billboard envelope is usually filled with teaser copy about what’s inside. There is no attempt to disguise the purpose or nature of the mail. Billboard style envelopes we’re all familiar with are the Reader’s Digest and Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes mailings.

If you’re mailing to consumers on behalf of a locally based retail or service business the billboard type envelope maybe more appropriate for you also.

For example, the envelope may actually have a $5.00 discount coupon on it for your restaurant with a big, boldly lettered message, “$45.00 more of coupons plus other free gifts inside.”

The attractive thing about a billboard envelope style is you can use cheap bulk rate postage without concern over it’s contradicting the private, personal appearance of the envelope. As you no doubt know the difference between bulk and first class postage costs is substantial.

If you are not familiar with using bulk mail, by the way, visit with your local postmaster for information. It’s really simple and easy and requires only two hundred pieces of mail at a time.

I am not a bulk mail fan. I don’t like the delayed even uncertain delivery but there are circumstances where cost is such a factor that bulk mail has to be used.

After you’ve made your envelope decision you can move on to the inside component parts of the mailing. Here’s a BIG tip to make sure that the inside components are consistent with the envelope:

A sneak up envelope, stuffed with colorful flyers and coupons is an irritant to the recipient. He feels that he was conned into opening the envelope. He’s disappointed because he expected a letter and he’s very unlikely to then be responsive to your offer. On the other hand a lengthy soft sell letter is unnecessary in a billboard style envelope promising discounts on dry cleaning inside.

In a sneak up envelope the typical components might be:

1. A letter from one to eight pages long is common in direct mail. Four pages is probably average. I’ve seen them as long as sixteen pages and I’ve used one that was twenty-four pages long. The more extreme your sneak up approach was outside the more personalized this letter needs to appear.
2. A brochure or flyer or brochures or flyers. Sometimes if the sneak up approach was extreme or if I’m really working at controlling the process I’ll put these pieces inside a smaller sealed envelope imprinted with the instruction to open only after reading my letter.
3. A response device. This might be an order form or order card, a reply card or form asking for more information, coupons or certificates to be brought to a place of business, a toll free number to call or a combination of those things. In business-to-business marketing I have found little difference in response based on the use of postage paid response cards or envelopes. In consumer marketing postage paid response devices increase response.
4. Sometimes a separate guarantee certificate or receipt is included that the person is expected to keep. In a billboard style envelope the component parts may include a letter, although it need not be separate or appear personalized. It can be built into a brochure, the cover of a brochure or you can use the combination letter and brochure.

It could also include a brochure or flyer that does not need to be concealed in any way. Another smart thing to include is a response device. Sometimes this is even included in the brochure.

As a general rule of thumb the contents of a billboard envelope can stand to be less classy than those in a sneak attack envelope. In the billboard envelope it’s common to use different sizes and colors of paper as well as other inserts like stick-on stamps, yes or no option stamps, little gifts like refrigerator magnets, imprinted pens or even product samples.

All intentionally designed to fall out all over the place after you’ve opened the envelope. The operable theories here are that multiple pieces proportionately increase the chances of getting the person to read something before discarding all of it.

These involvement devices like stick-on stamps increase the person’s curiosity and create interest and these enclosures with some perceived value guilt the person into reading the piece. You will have to think through which options are most appropriate for your audience – your particular prospects.

If you decide to use an envelope mailing you now have two other basic choices to make: the use what I call the billboard or the sneak up approach.

Many marketers favor the sneak up approach. In this approach there’s nothing on the outside of the envelope that identifies it as business mail. There is no company name in the return address.

There is either a person’s name or no name at all, just the address. There is no teaser copy, no headlines, words or phrases indicative of what’s inside.

Sometimes an odd size envelope rather than a standard number ten business envelope is used.

To carry this sneak attack to the ultimate extreme there are no labels used. The addressing is either done by hand or individually typed and postage stamps are used not postage meter impressions.

The theory behind this is sometimes called ‘A’ Pile, ‘B’ Pile; that most people sort their mail near a waste basket. A lot of so called junk mail obvious as ‘B’ Pile Mail gets thrown out unopened or after only a glance. The mail that gets ‘A Pile’ treatment often opened immediately and read looks like personal mail. It comes in envelopes. There’s a letter inside when you open it.

The object of the sneak attack is to insure ‘A Pile’ treatment. I’ve used versions of this sneak up approach many times with significant success. I believe in the validity of the theory. This approach is especially applicable to mailings to high level executives or business owners, mailings to doctors and lawyers, political fund-raising direct mail or charitable fund-raising direct mail.

An added twist to this technique is the use of a famous person’s name or an important person’s title as part of the return address on the envelope. I happen to be a contributor to several Republican and conservative political organizations so I wound up on every Republican fund-raising mailing list there is.

As a result, not only do I get envelopes return addressed from the Republican Senatorial Club but also from other Republican political figures. Even knowing that it is fund-raising mail I kind of feel compelled to open it.

I’ve received sneak up mail from an insurance firm return addressed from Art Linkletter at a street address. No company name, no clue that it was from an insurance company. Titles can also work. Not long ago I got an envelope return addressed from, “The Chairman of the Board, The Golden Nugget Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.”

Much more likely to be opened than an envelope just from The Golden Nugget and the envelope was typewriter addressed no stick on label. It had a postage stamp not a meter impression and the letter inside was on the chairman’s personal stationary individually addressed to me. I read it. Had it just been from The Golden Nugget and had a brochure inside instead of a letter I would have probably thrown it out unread.

These types of mailings are what most people are thinking of when they talk about junk mail. And that is one of the big disadvantages of using these types of mailings. Many people throw them out almost immediately with just a glance.

The biggest advantage of self-mailer formats, of course, is their low cost. An envelope mailing is anything sent in a sealed envelope.

You should or at least can use the lower cost self-mailers when…..

#1: You are mailing to a list of your own established, loyal customers who will certainly be interested in your message and will read it just because it came from you. A clothing store might use a post card, for example, to inform regular customers that the new autumn fashions have arrived or that a special sale is going to take place.

Or…

#2: You are promoting a sale or other specialty event for a very well known, popular business and recipients will instantly identify the business and the nature of the offer. A tri-fold flyer might work well for a home improvement store, for example, promoting a spring fix up sale. People receiving it, who are do-it-yourselfers will probably look at it. The others will discard it and that’s okay.

Or…

# 3: If you’re tied to a very small budget.

You should try to avoid self-mailers when you are not mailing to your own customers. When prospecting for new business some type of envelope mailing is almost always more effective. Or, when you are telling a lengthy, detailed sales story.

Self-mailers need to be more like billboards than letters in most cases. People have difficulty accepting something as a letter when it doesn’t come in an envelope.

Other examples of when you should avoid using self mailers is if you are trying to get your message read by a person whose mail is probably screened, such as an executive or a doctor. Or, you need multiple pieces to properly present your offer and finally if you need to achieve an above average response rate.

There’s another very general rule of thumb; self-mailers are less acceptable and less effective in business-to-business marketing than in consumer marketing.

If you decide to use an envelope mailing you now have two other basic choices to make using what I call the billboard or the sneak up approach which I will explain in my next post.