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Paper Direct Mail Is Not Dead

I recently witnessed a conversation about the “death” of paper direct mail due to the “life” of web presence and blogs. I’m not exactly sure why, but someone seems to declare the “death” of a marketing technique every few months…I guess that’s how some consultants stay employed – announce the “death” of something and create the “life” of something new. Anyway, I disagree with the notion paper direct mail is dead and as such thought I’d share how we integrate paper direct mail into our marketing, sales, and lead nurturing systems.

We do a fair amount of direct mail – postcards, sales letters, brochures, etc. – to generate sales leads and provoke interest in our and our customer’s services. We integrate paper direct mail with our web presence to provoke ongoing interest using unique landing pages specific to each direct mail piece and routinely use sales letters to generate leads.

Provoking Ongoing Interest
To warm suspects for sales opportunities what we do is create a direct paper mail piece – postcard, letter, brochure, etc. – and send it to a list of targeted employees at specific companies we’ve identified as part of a customer profile. We provide a unique URL to continue the dialogue from a particular subject within a paper direct mail piece – in essence we ask a question in the paper direct mail piece and answer the question on a landing page. The landing page continues the flow of information from the printed source. We are careful to keep the font, color, graphics, etc. the same on the landing page – this bridges the paper direct mail to our web presence.

Example: We did a direct mail postcard for a customer not long ago. The piece begged the question of how outside counsel spent their time; a graphic included two business people standing by a water cooler. The URL that continued the dialogue of managing outside counsel was watercooler.customersdomain.com.

We accomplish two things by employing landing pages this way: we track specific interest of our customers and prospects (we track stats for the landing pages and correlate it to a mailing schedule), and bridge suspects to the “stickiness” of our web presence. Our belief is if you can hold an audience, you can continue to market to them. We’ve found this technique highly effective in bringing prospects to our site.

We can

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easily test messages and service offerings with this technique.

Sales Letters
Within the past year we have successfully used paper direct marketing to position and sell one of your customer’s web-based service to local governments – city, school district, special district, county, state. Using a one page letter with compelling content and overt calls to action to meet face-to-face, we have successfully met with 30 county Supervisors or Executives in the state of California.

As background, there are 58 counties in California and in the campaign I’m citing we only targeted the 40 largest. Our paper direct mail campaign was designed to generate face-to-face meetings. The results of this campaign were meetings with 30 County Supervisors or executives (Chief Administrative Officer or County Counsel - the most senior non-elected officials in county government). From letter to meeting was one phone call. Our campaign had a success rate of 75%! Paper direct marketing works.

The average annual value of each customer we targeted in this campaign was $200K. Our cost of the paper direct marketing campaign was a one page letter, envelope, and $.37 stamp sent to approximately 350 people. We printed the letters and envelopes in our office and had two people assigned to follow-up. The first customer we earned from this campaign paid for this effort many times over.

We have a campaign underway at this time targeting the 100 largest school districts in the US. We’re experiencing similar results.

And, in case you’re wondering….Yes, we’ve used the same technique in approaching F1000 senior executives and have enjoyed similar success.

Paper Direct Mail is Alive and Thriving
In this emerging era of Internet use, paper direct mail remains relevant and happily coexists with traditional websites and blogs – neither is an either or decision. All have an important use in sales and marketing, and paper direct mail remains relevant…it still works.

About the Author

Jim Logan is founder of Accelerate Business Group, LLC, a revenue growth company. Accelerate Business Group partners with their customers to build revenue the only three ways possible - getting more new customers, increasing the value of your average sale, and getting more repeat business. Jim can be reached at http://www.jslogan.com.