In direct mail, when you follow certain rules you increase response, but when you break the rules you suffer a declining response. Many of these rules are what a casual observer would think of as minor or inconsequential. But that is false; they are significant and they do impact response.
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A direct marketing website can have a variety of purposes. Most marketing sales websites will have an objective of collecting email addresses in their database for future marketing campaigns. Here are 6 tactics that I recommend:
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Should your budget be increased for January? For marketers, this is the best month of the entire year for direct marketing response. Traditionally, the day after Thanksgiving, known as “Black Friday,” is considered the busiest retail shopping day of the year.
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When you write your direct mail letter, magalog, website or email copy, you need to follow an important direct response copy rule. This rule is to use an “active voice.” Here are 3 examples of active voice versus nonactive voice:
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How important is it to simplify your website's shopping cart for leads or customers? Here is another test confirming the importance of an issue I have discussed in Direct Marketing Update several times: shopping cart simplicity. Test: Version A, which had 10,245 unique visitors, required its users to click 9 times before they could purchase the product. Version B, which had 10,314 unique visitors, reduced the ordering path to 4 clicks.
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One of the little-known secrets of successful, profitable direct mail strategies is something that would make many executives of corporations, or traditional graphic artists, cringe: copy on the back of the envelope. That's right, we have seen copy on the back of the envelope increase response by as much as 15%. It can be a powerful curiosity stimulator.
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Using a sidebar can help you generate sales and leads on a website, a direct marketing microsite or a direct marketing landing page. When we create a website for our clients, we typically design it 70% main copy and 30% sidebar copy. Here are 7 more rules that will help increase your response and avoid a costly blunder:
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Always approach copywriting from a position of authority. The feel of the copy, the tone, the energy—must come across as authoritative. Authoritative copy is copy that uses specific information, details, figures and facts that will resonate. Your prospects must feel that the voice behind the copy knows the subject matter and speaks with authority. Your readers must feel confident that the copy is speaking to them with conviction. Your copy has to relate to their challenges and solve their concerns.
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Through the years, we have found the response between genders can sometimes be surprisingly different depending on the look and copy content of a direct mail campaign. Males and females respond differently to format, creative approach, color, pictures, offer, benefits and copy.
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6 Powerful Tactics to Boost Direct Mail Sales
Below are direct mail tactics proven to lift response for magalogs, but these ideas can also be applied to other direct mail formats.
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One of the great benefits of the Internet has been the ability to direct market internationally. Marketers are finding that orders multiply especially if they take the following steps:
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Did you know that a significant source of your business' income can come from renting your current, inactive and inquiry lists? For example, I just sent a client of mine, who has a list of about 50,000 names, his monthly check of $53,000. This adds up to more than half a million dollars a year—just for renting his list! What you must knowYou always need to give permission before someone else can use your list, even for a one-time rental.
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One way to supercharge your response is to take a newsworthy topic that relates to your product or service and integrate it into your sales copy. What is going on in your prospect’s mind? Think about a hot business, political or current issue that is being talked about on the news, in magazines or in the papers—an issue that your prospect will recognize, be curious about and be interested in.
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Consumers tend to pay more attention to your product or service when you offer them a discount or “special” offer. However, how much more of a response do you think you would have if you attached a timeline to your discount or special offer? Recently, a test was conducted to show how consumers responded when given two limited-time offers to react to a discount.
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One of the little-known and overlooked ways of boosting response is dating your direct mail piece. There are several different ways to date your direct mail, some more effective than others. The most effective way of dating is to put the actual month, day and year on the top of your sales letter as you would a personal letter. By duplicating what you use for traditional communication, it will make the sales piece more personal, immediate and newsworthy.
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In order to design your website to maximize your sales or leads, you need to understand your audience. What prompted them to come to your URL? What is it that they are looking for or expecting? To the extent that you are able to identify why prospects are there and identify their desires, you are more likely to generate leads and sales from their visits to your site. Your prospects have a variety of reasons why they visited to your website.
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In the past couple of issues, I’ve discussed how critical it is to choose your words carefully when writing copy for your direct marketing campaign—both online and offline. In case you missed last week’s issue, visit www.cdmginc.com/dmuarchives. This week, I'm going to tell you about words you shouldn’t use—“words of doubt.”
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Testing copy concepts is crucial to improving your response. Often what you think will generate a higher response is not always the case. I have tested hundreds of teasers, catalog covers and magalog covers in search of the highest return. Time and time again, when I speak at conferences and show examples of what I have tested and ask people to pick the winning cover, they chose the one that generated the lower response.
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It's crucial that you keep your direct mail campaign exciting, fresh and intriguing. In the past few issues I've discussed the benefits of using bullets on your magalog cover as well as how to write mouth-watering magalog cover-copy. Now I want to dig deeper into what really makes a direct mail campaign, particularly a magalog, command your prospect's attention. Because the magalog looks so much like a magazine, it is hard for your prospects to resist picking it up and reading it.
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I rarely use navigation choices in a direct marketing website. Sometimes I will allow a navigation choice at the end of the text if I feel a significant percentage of the audience needs additional information or verification. If this is the case, then I will provide a link that will offer additional in-depth sales copy.
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