Lead Generation via email marketing is a Vital Part of Growing your Business

I have found that direct mail and emarketing campaigns are a fantastic way for us to generate leads for our business.

Email Marketing is trackable, inexpensive, and easily measurable. 

Emarketing enables you to have  a predictable number of leads coming into your pipeline on a regular basis at an affordable cost.

Below are the seven strategies that are necessary to ensure a successful direct marketing campaign.

Step 1: Build Your Database (Subscribers) , add value to them and educate them on what your value proposition is. .

The better you know your subscribers and the better they know you,  the more effective your direct mail campaign will be.

A generic database will generate an open rate of between 10% - 20%, and an open rate of between 2 % is good.

If you can segment your database, and market relevant items that are of interest to the relevant segment, the above open rates and click through rates will escalate dramatically.

The more you are able to segment your database, the better!

 The majority of the time, it is much more effective to send out several hundred pieces to your specific niche market such as recent retirees, truck drivers, coaches, accountants, doctors, rather than blanket neighborhoods at random.  

You can get lists of your prospective customers from list brokers who sell contact information for different groups of people.  To get a good idea if your email campaign is working or not you should be sending out a minimum of 3000 emails at a time.

Step 2: You must have a follow up sequence in place for your mailings.

The majority of people who send information about a subject or an event, send out one email  and then stop.

 

To maximise the chance for your success,  you must have sequential mailings, I recommend a minimum of three mailings for each campaign. 

To increase the effectiveness of each email, reference the previous email you have sent instead of sending the same email. 

 Ideally,  you must use multiple steps and multiple media.  As long as each mailing sequence you do is profitable you should continue emailing until the last step is no longer profitable.

Step 3: Build a collection of “R&D files.”

If you see or receive any marketing materials including mail that is eye catching or is just great marketing, keep it for ideas on your next mailer that you send out.  

If you are having a hard time coming up with what to mail look through your “R&D file” and adapt your marketing based on your favorite ideas and pieces that you have collected over time.

Step 4: Track your leads and how much they cost.

By tracking your leads and costs per lead you can improve on your response rate and increase your effectiveness. 

What you can measure you can manage!

Some of the easiest ways to do this include using different names on letters, different telephone numbers, or asking the customer how you heard about your business. 

Send different emails to different parts of your database to track your marketing to see what is working the best.  

Send out two or more different mailings to prospective customers with different messages and designs to see which ones achieve a better response rate. 

We call this “split testing”

You should be split testing regularly so that you can sharpen your ax and have the most effective marketing.  For those just starting out you can keep track of the prospects that respond in an Excel spreadsheet but it would be wise to switch to a CRM tool  as soon as possible.

Step 5: Headlines are everything in direct mail marketing.

People are swamped with advertisements from TV, radio, online, and direct mail so you must make your headline stand out and be relevant to your target customer. 

 Most people are not paying attention to every advertisement so you really have to shake them to their core with something that is relevant and attention grabbing.  

Part of the reason why tabloid magazines are succesful is because of the exciting and gripping headlines the writers use.  

When you are choosing your headline, write down as many as you can think of.  Some copywriters write as many as 100 before choosing the one that best fits for the message they are trying to convey.

 The headline is the most important part of any sales pitch because if you can’t grab attention with the headline then there is no way your prospect will care to read the rest of your message.

Step 6: To truly be successful with direct mail and leverage your time effectively you must create an automated system for your direct mail campaigns.

With an automated system you know how many emails you send out, how many responses you are getting, and how many leads it takes to convert into a customer.  Based on that information you can tweak your marketing by sending out more or less mail depending on your response rate. 

Step 7: To dramatically increase your response rates with direct mail, follow up the people who click through to the various opportunities with a telephone call

There is nothing like personalised service! The objective is to develope a relationship with your customer!

Happy Marketing!