Establishing credibility

[Matthew Berry]

Hello everyone,

My wife and I are new to the business. We've been going at it pretty consistently for the past five months. We are combining several strategies for lead generation and direct mail is one of them. We are using a specific list for targeting vs. EDDM (via USPS).

The biggest challenges we have is establishing credibility. We tried yellow letters for the first few months, but found that the groups we're targeting did not respond well to those. So we began sending out professional white letters with logo, letterhead, etc. Envelopes are still hand-addressed, but contain our logo on the front of it.

The response has been about the same, about 0.50% response rate.

The biggest hurdle we're trying to overcome is that our company is a scam or fraudulent. We know that we're committed to integrity, but our recipients don't believe it. Just yesterday, we received an email from one of our leads, kindly requesting to be removed from our "scam" list.

What do you do in order to establish the appearance of credibility? I'm debating whether to pay the BBB-mafia in order to get their logo on my materials. Are there other agencies or organizations that you recommend joining in order to make use of their logos?

Aside from associating with agencies/organizations, what else has worked to overcome this hurdle?