Direct mail is another effective outreach tool to promote your credit services. Despite the countless technological advances of the past century, direct mail just keeps on delivering, generating billions in income per year and actively influencing national political campaigns to this day.
Just make sure that when you do direct mail, you do things differently than most do. Don’t send a standard letter in a standard No. 10 envelope. Save money. Save money a couple of different ways.
One way you save money is to buy close-out envelopes. Buy envelopes that are pink, yellow, green, it doesn’t matter. Make something different. I can talk for days and write hundreds more pages, strictly on tactics in direct mail that work, because the subject is near and dear to me. But one thing to remember with direct mail is be different.
The first job of direct mail is staying out of that “B” pile…you know, the one that’s destined for the trash can. Whenever anyone gets the mail, over eighty percent of people, and this is another one of those statistics that’s made up but is probably accurate, over eighty percent of the people who get the mail out of a mail box, automatically throw away the “B” pile, without ever even opening it.
Your job at direct mail, if you ever decide to do direct mail, is to make sure you’re not in the “B” pile. This is not rocket science, though, and effective direct mail always comes down to very simple techniques and tricks.
One simple effort is different color envelopes, different size envelope, and especially — live stamps! Don’t use metered stamping, it’s ugly, impersonal and boring. These are a couple of good tips on direct mail that can make a drastic difference on your response rates, because before you ever get a chance to convert, you have to get opened.
Once you get opened, it’s going to be up to you to write an effective sales letter that has copy, and this book isn’t about writing copy in an effective sales letter, but you must understand some basics of copy.
Study some copyrighting experts like Dan Kennedy, or Joel Bauer.
The only way you’ll get your mail opened is if it looks genuine. Handwrite the envelopes, don’t use labels. You can even put the stamp on a little bit crooked. That’s helped the response rates. When Super Hero stamps were popular, we used Super Hero stamps all the time, and used to go to the post office and buy every Super Hero stamp that they had.
