Direct Marketing Is Dead?
For longer than any of us have been alive, there have been people rambling and ranting about how direct mailing is dead. You can read a book from the 1970’s where a copywriter will say exactly what I’m about to in this article.
Check out this comment thread from Reddit:
Now, if you were a new person starting their own business, you’d read that and think, “Direct marketing is dead!” You’d probably also draw the conclusion that it’ll stay dead because Millennials don’t have post boxes and even when they do, they hate direct mail.
So, is direct mail really dead this time?
Fortunately, solving this conundrum doesn’t require any time or money of your own. You simply have to think about the metrics. If direct mailing pieces didn’t work, you wouldn’t get them for very long, because it’s not cheap to mail stuff – it’s even more expensive to produce flyers and then have underpaid but still flesh-and-blood human beings hand deliver them for you.
From this, we can assume that someone is making money – and it’s not just the people who print the flyers.
Direct mail is dead in the same way as the villain in your favourite horror franchise is; no matter how many times someone says, “this is the final chapter” you know that it’s coming back to make money from you sooner or later.
What Is Direct Mail?
Direct mail is generally used to refer to something that is physically mailed to the intended customer. Added to that, I suppose you could add the caveat that most direct mail is also direct response marketing; that is, you send it out in the hope you’ll get a response from the recipient – usually an order, subscription or donation.
I’ll be using this definition, though be aware that most people think of direct mail as only flyers that pizza places put through your door and other flyer-type things with discounts or phone numbers to ring.
Actually, that disconnect will lead us quite well into the next section.
How To Make High Quality Direct Mail Pieces (HINT: This was cutting edge back in the 70s)
“Nobody falls for direct marketing anymore!”
“I put all those letters I don’t want straight in the bin!”
“I bet nobody makes any money with these letters!”
Like I wrote in the introduction, these arguments are older than all of us. Luckily, there’s some cutting edge advice that means your direct mail pieces never have to be put in the slush pile like the jokers’ letters above.
By cutting edge, I mean probably a hundred years ago. For those of you who read the books in the Gary Halbert Challenge, you’ll know that Claude Hopkins recommended something crazy that still works today.
That is… write a direct mail piece that doesn’t look like a direct mail piece.
Gary Halbert recommended simple things like using an actual stamp and hand writing the address. This is all basic stuff which works today too.
In fact, here’s an example from when a complete novice who didn’t know what he was doing tried direct mailing for the first time.
How My First Direct Mailing Campaign Went (Before I Even Knew What It Was)
Long before I knew anything about copywriting, I started a miniature business (doomed to fail, really) selling online services to people who weren’t very good at that sort of thing.
Naturally, what success I had was down to doing the opposite to what everyone else was doing.
Whilst everyone was spamming the hell out of blog comments everywhere in order to get top rankings on Google search, I decided to target companies the old-fashioned way.
I picked about twenty companies in high-paying niches and I – get this – wrote them a letter.
Now, I didn’t know anything about direct marketing or copywriting. It’s pretty laughable really that I thought this would work. I had a book of stamps and I wrote an actual letter detailing the three top problems these companies had with their online stuff, and then I printed them all out and put them in individual envelopes, wrote the addresses on them by hand and then walked to the post box and sent them off on their way.
I got three replies from those twenty letters – even though my call to action was weak and complicated. (They had to phone me to discuss the weaknesses. I would never do anything like this now.)
That’s a 15% success rate.
Now, plenty of stuff was terrible about that, plus the UK isn’t as direct mail friendly as the US. But what I do know is that none of those companies threw the letter in the bin before reading it. None of the companies that contacted me thought of what I was doing as a “marketing piece.”
It didn’t look like a flyer or a spammy promotional tactic, and it worked.
If you create direct mail campaigns that look and feel real, they will work.
Final Thoughts
Anyone who tells you direct mail doesn’t work is an idiot or a liar.
The methods change (slightly) and the aesthetics change, but the overarching philosophy works all the time.
Why?
Because direct mail is like any other mail; if it looks enticing and adds value to a person’s or company’s life, then they’re going to value it. If it provides this and gives a pathway or hints at there being more good stuff down the line, then it will get a response.
Providing you achieve the above, you’ll have a successful direct marketing campaign.