Marketing Strategy: If You're Going to Market you must have an Offer, or Don't Bother

Let’s focus today on direct mail marketing. The whole reason you send something out is because you want something positive to happen. Ideally what you want to have happen is that you want someone to agree to hold an appointment with you, or perhaps you want them to sign up for a seminar or something like that. When you do this your response rate is usually less than one percent. Even when the response rate is that horrible it can still be worth your investment and that’s exactly why you do it again.

But wouldn’t it be great if you could increase your response rate to 1% or 3% or how about 10%? You can, and it isn’t any harder to create a marketing piece with a 10% response rate than it is to create one with a less than 1% response rate. Your costs are the same, and obviously the return on your investment is much greater. So, why not get a better response rate?

The biggest difference is how you construct the offer, presuming you even have an offer in the pieces you’re mailing out now. I know most of you are concerned about compliance, but when you do it right that isn’t an issue. Before you even get to the offer keep in mind that the information you’re mailing should never be about you and how great you are. If it is you’d be better off just throwing it in the garbage yourself and saving the postage.

A good offer is interesting to the reader. It’s pretty easy to make an offer that’s interesting to the reader when you know who the reader is and what their interests are. That isn’t hard. You have a lot of that information right in your customer files, and if you don’t there are a lot of pretty easy ways to gather that information. An offer is interesting when it appeals to the things that your reader is interested in. It’s even more appealing when it addresses something they’re looking for.

An offer requires the reader to take an action to get whatever is offered. It never ceases to amaze me how many people forget the little detail of telling the reader exactly what to do to respond to the offer. Now, remember the reader is a complete stranger so you want to make the response mechanism as none threatening and non-intrusive as you possibly can. They may be able to fax something back to you, call a 24 hour 800 number, visit your website, or mail something back. The idea is to give them options so they don’t have to directly call and talk to you because that’s exactly what their afraid of and not ready to do yet.

If your offer is simply an appointment that’s one of the lowest value offers you can make. Because that offer isn’t appealing to the reader. They don’t see what’s in it for them thus they’re very resistant to that offer. You’re far better off offering valuable information or a valuable experience first, making sure they clearly understand why it’s valuable to them. This enables you to start a relationship that didn’t exist before and move a complete stranger a step closer to appointing you. When you go for the low value appointment first you get a “no” pretty quick when it could just as easily have been a “yes” that leads to business if you’d started off in the right way.

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