In today’s market, finding buyers and clients is difficult. Money everywhere is down. The stock market sucks. People aren’t leaving their houses because it costs too much to eat out or to put gas in the car. And a stimulus bill is supposed to fix this?
I have seen it in a lot in my endeavors, and it sucks. As a business owner you are faced with the tough decision of cutting expenses, letting employees go, or totally closing up shop.
Within the last 4 or 5 months, I have had to experience all of these issues. And with them comes the thoughts of hopelessness and failure. But more than any of that, it’s the thought of being a disappointment that upsets me the most.
One thing you do is pull some cash together and do a mailing.
For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might remember that I posted something to the effect of stamps being so damn expensive! Well, what I was doing was a small direct mailing from a list that I had. The mailing was simple – a 2 page letter that was written as personal communication and hand addressed.
For those of you doing math in your head, that’s 500 hand addressed envelopes with a letter and my signature on it. All told, it took close to 40 or so hours to get them in the mail.
Just so you can get a look at the letter and the way I did it, I’ll post a download and pics below..
Basically, the letter just posed a problem, suggested a solution, and introduced myself. It was meant to be read by a business owner or someone directly related to a company’s website.
After about two weeks, we compiled the results. Of the 500 letters that were sent:
- 82 came back due to bad mailing addresses. I know it’s advisable to clean a list with a postcard which is cheaper to mail, but money was tight…
- I got 13 special report downloads. The special report was ironically about lead generation using your website.
- We received 2 direct phone calls about our services
- We also got 3 direct emails about our stuff
Total, that’s 18 responses out of 418, or 4.8%. Now, 18 leads might not sound like a lot, but it’s better than none! And when you are selling a product that costs about $4,000 on average that has potential to equal some significant revenue!
Once one of those deals close, we’re going to dump some of the proceeds back into the same marketing effort and see what kind of results we can get from our total list of over 2700!
Have you had any experience with direct mail? Good? Bad?
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{ 2 comments }
Jason,
I am a little skeptical of direct mail because the reward does not seem to be there, as seen with the low percentage responses. However, direct mail is worth a shot to see what happens. Direct mail is without a doubt more effective with a product that sells for thousands versus, say $50. Thanks for the post. Keep up the solid work.
Thanks Josh – I agree with you.. I didn’t like direct mail either because of the lower percentage response. But to my (new) way of thinking it’s like this: I spend $200 and some time for a return of at least $2000 if I sell one website..
If I get interest from 10 people, that fills up my queue with semi-warm leads for the next couple months…
Truthfully, I have already gotten in front of 5 potential clients that I wouldn’t have sat down with otherwise. So it small campaign has really helped a lot.