When writing to business prospects, remember that business decisions are often made by groups rather than individuals.
Therefore, your product must be positioned in a way that it will appeal to several different people who make decisions based on separate and distinct criteria.
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With the new world of digital printing, your ability to personalize your mailings has increased exponentially.
You can change text and images to match the preferences of each recipient on your segmented list. But does this kind of personalization make a huge difference in results?
This week’s test takes a look at digital personalization.
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There is an adage in the sales and marketing world that your best customer is a customer that you already have.
And for this reason you are likely to do well when you send a mailing to people who have purchased from you before.
But what about the almost-ran.
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After reading last week’s story on making sure your mailings got mailed, Mike, one of my readers, told me that he always wrote his postage checks directly to the post office—never to the lettershop.
He does this to ensure that the money is used only for postage for his jobs.
Mike got it half right...
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The first paragraph of your letter, email, website, brochure or other DR piece is one of the most critical elements of your mailing.
Grab your reader’s attention immediately
In one or two lines you must create suspense or drama or introduce something unexpected. More important, it must persuade your reader that it is in his or her best interest to keep reading.
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The subject line you put on your email is one of the two most important aspects of whether your email gets opened or instantly deleted.
As I talked about last issue, over 60% of your prospects are going to use the “from” line to weed out a lot of emails. But the second indicator that will be looked at to see if your email is worthy of a deeper look is the subject line.
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Earlier today, I was talking with my staff about another case where a lettershop, with the help of a postal worker, falsified 3602 forms to show a larger quantity of mail had mailed than actually went out.
In my experience a lettershop or printer, with or without the help of a postal worker, will often mail only 1/4 or 1/2 of a mailing and pocket the rest of the postage money.
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One major problem with most “image” advertising is that when prospects are done looking at it, they are not sure what to do with their new-found knowledge.
The reason is, the copywriter did not tell them what to do. The ads are missing what direct response copywriters know as a “call to action.”
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You may be interested to know that if you are using more direct response in your marketing, you are not alone. According to the marketing research firm The Winterberry Group, there has been a shift in marketing expenditures toward more direct response.
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In my speeches at conferences and in-house seminars, I talk about 12 common blunders on marketing websites.
Each and every one of them can impact the effectiveness of your website. One of these blunders is in the use of the navigation bar and navigational choices.
The cause of distractions that will greatly depress your results
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