Craig Simpson - The Direct Mail Solution: A Business Owners Guide to Building a Lead-Generating, Sales-Driving, Money-Making Direct-Mail Campaign

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

THANKS TO DAN KENNEDY FOR HIS GUIDANCE, RELENTLESS innovation, instruction, and brilliant insights on marketing and running a business. Without Dan, this book would not have been possible.

Much appreciation goes to my family for supporting me in the penning of this book. Thank you Heidi, Aiden, Quinton, and Ziann!

I also want to say a huge thank you to Ellen Dickstein, my personal friend and editor. She spent hours and hours helping me take my knowledge of direct mail and turn it into The Direct-Mail Solution.

It has also been a pleasure to work with Jillian McTigue, director of Entrepreneur Press, and Roe DAngelo, who provided outstanding editorial feedback. Last, but not least, thanks to Jeff Herman, my literary agent.

PREFACE

How I Started Making Money in Direct Mailand How You Can, Too!

AS A BUSINESS OWNER, ONE OF YOUR PRIMARY GOALS IS TO SEE your business grow and become more profitable. In my experience, direct mail is one of the most powerful tools available to help you achieve that.

Regardless of what business you are in, or how big it is, or even what type of customers you have... with the right information, I believe you will be able to develop a direct-mail program that will work for your business.

Marketing is a critical need of every business. It doesnt matter if you are selling software, clothing, or books, or if you manufacture some kind of widget.

Maybe you produce the best face cream in the world. Perhaps it even has the power to rejuvenate the skin and make people look 20 years younger!

You still could end up not making a dime.

Thats because unless somebody buys your face cream, you have no income stream. The product is just the beginning of the process. You have to have customers, too.

Theres one main way to grow any business, and thats to grow and expand your customer base. Its all about finding new customers and making additional sales to the ones you already have.

You have to find some way to get the word out about your business so that it reaches the widest possible group of potential buyers and convinces them to give you a try.

What are some of your options?

You could hang a sign out in front of your business. That could lure people in, but you would be reaching only the people who happen to be walking down the street and passing by the sign.

You could put an ad in a newspaper, but then youre reaching only people who read that paper, who happen to notice your ad as they turn to the sports section.

You could hire a blimp to carry your message across the sky on a streamer. That could potentially reach the whole citybut only the people who are looking up when the blimp goes by.

But what if you could get your message directly into the hands of large numbers of peoplepeople who are highly qualified to become your customers because they have spent money on products like yours in the past and are likely to spend more in the future?

Even better, what if you could put your message in an attractive package that gets their attention and holds it while you explain all the reasons why your product or service is better than any your competitors can provide?

And what if you could tell them about a special offer thats available for a limited time so that they feel compelled to respond to it immediately?

In a way, it would be as if you were having a private conversation with a thousand, ten thousand, maybe even a million hot prospects, explaining to them your product, touting its advantages, and presenting your unbeatable offer.

Oh, and one more thing... you could have that private conversation with people all over the country at the same time.

In essence, thats what direct-mail marketing is all aboutreaching out to large numbers of individuals or companies with a targeted, carefully crafted message that you put right in their hands.

And it works! Direct mail has been proven to be an extremely effective way to build and maintain just about any kind of business. In fact, many multimillion-dollar businesses have started with little more than an idea and a sales piece.

Now you too can begin to take advantage of this premier approach to advertising to build your own business. You just have to learn the proven techniques that can make your cash register ring. And Ive outlined them for you here in the pages of this book.

My Life in Direct-Mail Marketing

Ive spent my entire adult life in the direct-mail field. Over the years Ive strategized and executed thousands of direct-mail campaigns. Ive seen companies make hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of meticulously planned mailings.

And the techniques that worked for them can do wonders for you. Whether you want to mail only 500 pieces or youre ready to run a nationwide campaign of 100,000,000 piecesIve done it all. And this book will teach you all the secrets of direct-mail success Ive gathered over the years.

But let me start at the beginning. My first experience with direct mail came when I was just 19 years old. I was a young entrepreneur with big dreams, manufacturing rock-climbing holds (the fake rocks you bolt onto a wall to practice rock climbing). My manufacturing facility was a small workshop in my parents garage.

I was selling hundreds of these fake rocks through my friends, but I had big dreams. I wanted to get them into retail shops.

So I bought a list of 100 stores that I thought were good prospects to carry my rocks. Then I wrote a one-page sales letter and stuffed it into an envelope with one of my brochures. After licking the stamps and dropping the mail off at the post office, I sat back, waiting for the phone to start ringing off the hook.

So how did my first campaign do?

It completely bombednot a single phone call! How could things have gone so wrong? Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed.

And so my first experience with direct mail was similar to that of so many others: an unsuccessful campaign. For a while I even believed as many others do: that direct mail just doesnt work.

Now that Ive sent out hundreds of millions of sales letters and generated countless leads and customers, I can look back on my first campaign and laugh. Knowing what I do now, its obvious to me that I did everything wrong.

First, I got the list of names I mailed to from an unreliable source. So I could have sent my sales piece to people with no interest in rock climbing. Or the names could have been so old that the addresses were no good any more. Second, knowing nothing about writing sales copy, I prepared a very short letter, deluding myself into thinking I could convince people to buy $150 worth of rocks in just two paragraphs. And those two paragraphs were just bad, focusing on the features of my rocks, not on their benefits. (Ill explain more about that in Chapter 2.)

Fortunately, that wasnt the end of the story for me. I didnt give up on my direct-mail campaigns for my rock-climbing-hold business. I kept testing different methods until I found a few that worked. And as a result, I ended up selling over 4,000 fake rocks!

Now, you may be familiar with the saying, Be careful what you wish for. Success doesnt always turn out to be what we expect, and after a few years of working in my own sweatshop, I decided that manufacturing rocks was not the business I wanted to be in after all.

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