Direct Mail Best Practices
Here are a few ideas to boost from your direct mail efforts.
Announce New Products or Services. You don't have to wait for your new catalog to come out. Send a quick product sheet or post card with a link to your website to unveil your new wares.
Generate Sales Leads. Put an offer on your direct mail piece for a catalog, information packet, or newsletter. Pass off the responses to your sales department to fulfill requests and follow up.
Offer Demos and Samples. Nothing is more convincing for prospects to buy your product than if they see or try it for themselves. It's the perfect way to overcome objections, erase doubts, and allow people to become familiar with what you have to offer.
Conduct Surveys and Research. Collect data on trends, opinions, benchmarks, and other issues. Put your survey directly on your mailing or connect them to a page on your website. Reward each respondent with a small gift, a coupon, or a sweepstakes entry.
Send Direct Mail Offers. Sell via direct mail. Promote special pricing for responding to the offer. Products and services that are lower in cost are good candidates for direct sales. Also products that your customers are familiar with work well. You can also use an offer to upgrade or cross-sell existing customers.
Educate Customers and Prospects. Send postcards with short tips and insights into your area of expertise, send invitations to online tutorials, write a review on a new product or technology. These are just a few of the endless educational possibilities you can offer your audience
Email Marketing Best Practices
Compared to paper-based mail, which has been around in one form or another for thousands of years, email is still in its infancy. However, its speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness are already proving this as an outstanding lead generator. Marketers have begun to discover how to make it work. And here are a few of their secrets.
Write and attention-grabbing subject line. Make your subject line compelling by using action words such as "build" or "connect". Ask a question, or simply state your offer bluntly. The purpose of the subject line is simply to get people interested enough to want to continue reading more. However, your subject line doesn't have to sound promotional. Often, clear simply stated subject lines get better results than clever wording. Avoid spam blocking words such as "free" or "guarantee". Never use all caps, exclamation marks, or dollar signs.
Get to the point immediately. Expand on your subject line in the headline or first paragraph of your email text. Even if people take the time to open your email, they won't spend more than a couple of seconds deciding whether it's worth reading before hitting the delete button. So you have to telegraph your message clearly, completely, and quickly.
Include a salutation. Many email messages work fine without a salutation, looking more like short ads or announcements. But addressing your message to a specific name is usually better. Simply include hit word "Dear" followed by a field for the first name or first and last name of the recipient. If you don't have this option, you can address your message to a title or function, such as "Dear CEO", or "Dear Fellow Technician."
Keep it short (usually). Prevailing wisdom is that a personal email message should be from 200 to 500 words and a newsletter from 500 to 1,500 words. Of course, any length can be successful. But generally the shorter the better.'
Create a specific landing page. Don't send people to your home page. When people arrive, they'll simply click around a while and leave without giving you any clue about who they are. Instead, send them to a unique page with a form to collect at at the very least a name, company name, address and email address before providing acce3ss to additional information. Not only does this help you build your database, it also help you track the success of your email efforts.
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your marketing advisor (tphillips)
Contact Tamara Phillips
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