All Forum Posts by: Barry Hammond

I agree. Knock on her door. I mean don't harras her or anything, but think about it this way. I used to sell printing services back in the day. I knew who my targets were, I sent them letters. But I also went to their offices and asked for a meeting.

Why mail something when you can have an eyeball to eyeball conversation. A knock on the door will usually have a higher open rate than direct mail.

Christian Torres

I wouldn't be too upset with a 1-3% rate. Yellow letters have an unusually high expectation for this sort of thing and there are many reasons for that. Generally all the advice you are getting here is pretty good. You will find over trial and error is that there may be some tweaks here and there that work really well for you.

One tip you might want to consider that I have used with success in other applications, is the use of a custom typeface. The problem with "handwritten" fonts is that they are still so very clean. And they don't really let you get away from the feeling that what you are sending is a marketing piece.

I've found a cheat however, and depending on how much text you have, it's a great solution. It's a sight that converts your own personal handwriting into a digital font file. It's very clever. I can't tell you that it will work for what you are doing. But I'm incredibly curious. You can find the site by searching for "your fonts".

While each phishing scam is different, sometimes it isn't necessarily that they want your information, so much as they want you to respond. Think about our own efforts when marketing to lists. The more info we have, the tighter, more focused our marketing materials are. Also, many isp's make it more and more difficult for spammers. If they can show correspondence, or a record of correspondence to/from your email address, it makes it easier to get by a lot of security measures meant to thwart spam at the server level.

In any case. Your best bet with craigslist, is to build as many qualifiers into your ad as possible. Craigslist is a notorious tire-kicker farm, however, we generate a majority of our rental leads from CL. So much so, that there is now a friendly competition in our office to see if CL is more effective than bandit signs.

Monica Breckenridge

I'm going to tell you something that a lot of people may start throwing things at me for. But I would tell you to do exactly what you are doing in researching "canned" crm applications. But I would also tell you, that I crms are pretty lousy in general, and it seems that even the most popular applications fall short for many people most of the time.

If I were in your shoes, I would definatly make myself aware of what was out there, and then ask myself if the cost was worth learning to "play in someone else's playground".

Then I would tell you to explore the possibility of developing your own. To some this is a daunting task. But there are many nerds out there, who develop custom crm apps every day. I've designed my own apps using programs like filemaker (before you laugh at that, remember companies like walmart and itunes are using filemaker).

But seriously. Wouldn't it be nice having a crm that did things the way you do things, that costs less, and doesn't require you to jump through a bunch of hoops?

Tyler S.

You need to ask some different questions. A website by itself is easy to create. Getting that site to experience visitors and actually work for you is something entirely different.

Realize that your question is equivalent to asking how to build a building for your business and what the best way is to get customers inside that building.

First you need to start with what your goal is. What do you want your website to do? Get specific. If you want it to just be a static, online brochure - that's easy. If you want it to be a meaningful source of information for people to find you organically over the internet - that's a massive project. But it all starts wit what your specific goals are.

Justin Silverio,

No problem. The only thing I will caution you on is this. I spent about 15 years as a marketing consultant. One thing I've seen happen about 99.99999 % of the time is that people who don't actually track their direct mail responses, always like to guess that their response rate is anywhere from 15 to 30 %. While that is possible, an overwhelming number of people (including myself) have an experience that is contrary to that. If you get 15 to 30 % response that is not just unusual, it is ridiculously successful and you should be ready to take advantage of every single bit of it. If I were you, I would adjust your expectations to a more realistic bench mark of say 2%. If you hit your 10 - 15 that's great. But I've been doing this for a long time now and I have yet to see evidence that anyone should expect more than that. BTW, in the DM world 2% is considered it pretty meaningful accomplishments.

Good luck. Let me know how it turns out.

I'd be interested in seeing that copy as well. We're doing quite a bit in direct mail, and I'm always curious to see what is working.

David Tower

In all honesty, the Holiday probably matters most on the day itself. Beyond that, most people are in their routine all the way to the 11th hour, and immediately the day after. That said, how are you mailing, bulk or first class? Are you tracking your mailings? Do you know the average deliver time from your drop date?

I guess my point in all of this is that I think you are over analyzing. Your target list is not very big. Knowing that mail times in general vary, it's almost impossible to gauge.

Consider a bench mark response rate of 2%. Response being someone getting your letter and calling you. 2% of 644 is about 12 calls. Are you getting that?

The reality is, direct mail is a wide net approach. It's a little counter intuitive, but you are never going to see success in direct mail, if you look for ways to narrow your audience. When you are playing a numbers game, you need the odds in your favor.

Instead of limiting your list, you should be expanding it. Instead of sending one mailing you should be sending 4. To the same list.

If you have a phone number, use it - that is if they gave it to you as a response to your mail piece. You should follow the same rule of thumb with phone numbers as you do with email. If they didn't give it to you with permission to contact them, don't use it. It's just that simple.

As for us, we just don't mail the week of the holiday itself. But not for a lack of response, business in general slows down. Everyone shuts their brains off, and getting anything done becomes a real struggle. But we are sending thousands of pieces/week.

Hope that helps.

Lauren Hardy

In my humble opinion, I think a better question to ask is - "How do I answer every call, and make sure I'm not wasting time with 'tire-kickers'".

The very first rule you should set for yourself is "Every call get's answered by a live voice". Notice I didn't say your voice. You are experiencing a good problem. It's good that the phone is ringing. Bad because you didn't anticipate the work and time lost sorting out the rif raf.

That said, I agree with the others. The 800 number has no use anymore. Originally it was intended to keep incoming calls from the customer free. In this day and age, I don't know a single person who chooses not to make a call because it's long distance. Especially with voip.

Yours is a problem of qualifying. That takes effort, and expertise. But there are ways you can solve this. First off I would consider hiring a VA to answer the phone. This isn't always the best answer, but there are times when it's appropriate. You want this person to be able to qualify the lead, perhaps they have a script, or an informal survey they give in order to know how to handle the call. What you want to know is that every call that comes to your cell phone is a qualified lead. Using a VA is a smart way of getting that done.

Or you could consider other ways of qualifying leads. Instead of making the call to action a phone call, why not send them to a landing page on your website. Off the top of my head I'm thinking the landing page could be a small questionnaire or a contact me webform that, once submitted, will connect both you and the user by phone.

That one gets a little more complicated, but it is very doable, and not nearly as expensive as you might think.

In summary. Yes every call absolutely needs to be answered. You just need to create a reliable system for qualifying these calls before they ring through.

@Rick Harmon Funny you should mention infusionsoft as that is our CRM of choice. My application of choice for the collection and study of data is Filemaker Pro. That is primarily because filemaker not only allows you to collect and store data, but it also allows you to build applications around that data. Applications that you can use in your day to day operations.

However, in our case, simple spreadsheats to house summaries will work just fine. We live in an amazing age. The tools we need are all around us. Google analytics provides much of the data we use.

We use a VOIP phone system and so tracking incoming calls is very easy to do. Because it's voip, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility, from setting up unique numbers and attaching those number to specific campaigns. Reporting is also a very easy thing to pull off. I just download call records from whatever time period I need, and pull that data into my application to perform the summaries and create reports.

As far as PURLS are concerned, we use a service called Purlem. A lot of purl services force you to use their site as a host for your campaigns landing pages. Purlem, via their own plugin, gives you the ability to host the landing pages on your wordpress website. This is huge because it's very very easy to keep that traffic on your own real estate. I mean what's the point of driving traffic, if not to your site.

The Purlem interface is also a very simple and intuitive one. The reporting features are pretty basic, but that's ok. I have yet to discover a metric that purlem doesn't measure. But I imagine whatever purlem didn't measure, I could rely on google analytics to pick up the slack.

I don't want to turn this into an ad for PURLEM, but their biggest asset is Marty, the founder/owner. That guy never sleeps and responds to support requests day and night. When I started working with him, I pestered him about building an integration solution for infusionsoft. So he created one. Now, our purl results are passed through to infusionsoft, and can trigger an entirely different campaign.

So for a guy like me, who likes to see all my marketing efforts working together, this is a pretty slick solution. I get a list with name, address and one or two other pieces of information. When that user hits their personalize page, they have to update and ad to the info I have before they can "activate" their site. That then triggers, email drips, the creation of opportunity records, and contact by our sales staff.

The nice thing about infusionsoft, is that you have the ability to add custom features that are specific to your business. For us, we have clearly defined qualifiers for each step of the process. I use the "check list" feature when setting up the funnel steps. Infusionsoft at it's heart is a database, so you can get very granular in your reporting should you need to.

If you are interested in seeing it in action, send me a pm, and I'll create a test user url so you can see how it all comes together. Let me know if I can answer any ?'s as you move forward.