Off the wall direct mail ideas that improve your response rates

Letter Carrier Delivering Mail (Photo credit: Smithsonian Institution)

When the mailbox is overflowing with non-descript junk mail and mailers from every store in a hundred mile radius, it can be hard for your direct mail piece to stick out. If you’re finding yourself struggling more and more to find some sort of “hook” to get potential customers engaged in your direct mail pieces, see if any of these ideas provide a creative spark for your next campaign:

1. Give them something real. I work in the marketing world and a company that performs search engine link building sent me a piece of direct mail that you could tell included something solid. Inside was a small plastic “chain link” and an attached note that said “the first link’s on us”. The added bulk to the mailing certainly grabbed my interest and I not only opened the envelope, I called the company later that week.
2. Use a sticker. Yes, something as simple as a sticker giving the recipient a call to action can greatly increase your response rate. Making a colorful, noticeable sticker that ties to some sort of requested action inside (“What rate makes you want to buy? Fill out this form on our website for information on how you can lower your rate.”) This sort of call and response marketing provides some benefit for the user to perform an action and gets them engaged.
3. Go big. How can you intend to stick out when your mailing is the same, size, shape and color as everything else that comes in the mail? Invest in something bigger, whether it’s a manila envelope or something even larger. This will add to the perceived importance of your mailing piece, so make sure you give them your best on the inside to maintain that interest.

Looking for some more ideas or insight on direct mail? Check out these links:

• ·         http://info.tmrdirect.com/bid/117464/7-Brilliant-Ideas-To-Bring-Your-Direct-Mail-Campaign-To-Life
• ·         http://www.rittersprinting.com/postal-rate-chart.php
• ·         http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/193436

Increasing Sales Commission with Grids

(Photo credit: ultrakml)

Grids? One of the ‘aha’ moments we had when developing Focus happened when we were trying to come up with a visual representation of a sales pipeline. We know that a lot of you already keep your deals in a spreadsheet (and an early version of a Focus-like tool existed on a spreadsheet, too) so we were aiming to present information in a format that wasn’t completely alien to your normal way of working. At the same time, however, we wanted to convey both a sense of moving deals through the pipeline and of how the pipeline looked from a forecast point of view at any given time (something I learned while working under Michael D'Antonio of Impatto). We wanted to make sure you could open Focus and at a glance tell where you were in relation to your sales target. The answer was….. grids.

If you take a look at the Focus screenshots you’ll see we built a screen split into unique sections. On top of that, we made sure that certain sections were colored to clearly differentiate areas of the pipeline. Not every grid is shown in the screenshots but the red sections indicate your funnel - the deals waiting to go into your pipeline; the yellow sections are top line deals over which you have little or no influence; and the green sections are the deals you can directly influence - these are the deals included in your forecast. You can read more about how to decide in which grid a deal should sit in our Buying Process guide.

What makes Focus so good is that you can simply pick up a deal from one grid and drop it in another, either because you’ve successfully moved the deal closer to winning or because you want to see what difference the change makes to your target and - more importantly - your commission.

Grids make it easy to see where you are and easy to see what needs to change to improve your position. We like our grids.