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7 Tips to Building Better Direct Mail for Contractors

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Direct mail is a $40 billion dollar industry that can trace its roots back to the good old Sears catalog, where you could buy anything from mules to tractors to strawberries and ice. We’ve come a long way since those days, but unfortunately most of the direct mail pieces you get today haven’t, which is one of the reasons conversion ratios are stuck in the .05%-2% range.

But you can make sure your next campaign brings home the bacon simply by building a better direct mail piece from the top down. So let’s get started at the top and talk about headlines first.

1. The headline – This is the billboard of the piece. This is what convinces the reader that the rest of the ad is worth reading so make sure to grab them with a compelling statement in your headline.

2. Art/Pictures/Graphics – Try to stay away from stock clip art, it’s pretty obvious. Besides, you should have plenty of photos to use from your completed jobs. Use positive images that are eye-catching for your target.

3. Layout – The layout should look like a mini billboard. Keep it clean and uncluttered with a text-to-whitespace ratio as close to 50% as possible. This will make it easy on the eyes of your reader and easier for them to absorb your primary message.

4. Onto the message – Keep this short and sweet. Make your benefits to the reader the focal point while making sure to be as clear and concise as possible. You should also play to your reader’s emotions since this brings in a higher response rate.More

Go Big or Go Home!

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Post cards are a great way to turn passively engaged consumers into buyers by providing them with an irresistible offer right? Of course!

But they need to read it first!

So make your next direct mail piece easier to get read by sending out an over-sized mailer. Instead of the usual 4×6 postcard that gets overlooked, why not shoot for a 6×8 or larger piece?

Sending larger direct mail cards allows you to:

Say more – if you don’t say it, people assume you don’t do it.

Stand out – increase your chances of gaining a new client or customer by being the biggest thing they take out of their mailbox that day.

Big mail gets read – In fact, the bigger the piece, the better your chances are that your mail gets read first.

You can mail cheaper – I normally recommend that contractors send DM pieces First Class mail for regular 4×6 sized cards. It is a confidence factor that speaks volumes about your organization when the prospect is deciding on what to do with your piece. But bigger direct mail cards can’t go out regular First Class, but you can still send them cheaper since the implied perception is that they cost more (and they do) because they are bigger. Which means the information is more valuable to the reader. Remember, it is all psychological. So, the next time you do a mail drop; make sure you go big to get a better responses!

Make Your Direct Mail Pull Double Duty

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direct mail for contractorsBranding and direct marketing shouldn’t go together. They are night and day in the marketing world. But, in a few short words, I am going to show you how you how to do it…and succeed! Branding creates awareness or build on an attitude about your company. It’s what you want people to “think” or “feel” about you. In direct response advertising, you are trying to motivate people into action. Pick up the phone, stop into your showroom or send you an email. It’s what you want them to “do”.

Breaking down branding

Branding doesn’t do much in the way of converting prospects into client or customers on a per message basis, but over time, branding will be the subtle nudge people need to move them into action. What branding should do is:

  • Get attention for your company
  • An image or feeling about your company, Think Starbucks.
  • Memorable…if done right
  • A powerful, creative idea

Direct response advertising is what makes the cash register ring. Great direct response advertising:

  • Also get’s attention
  • Delivers an offer to the person consuming the ad
  • Motivates the reader into responding
  • Begins building the relationship between client or customer and you
  • To get the most out of your direct mail, you need to…
  • Target the highest potential prospects, in other words, people ready to buy!
  • Motivate the consumer perform an action, so you need to ask for a response
  • Measure the success with some type of key code or offer code
  • Expect a positive ROI

To generate a positive ROI, you need to focus on the key elements of a direct marketing campaign. This means you need to focus on your list by trying to pinpoint “buyer”. Once you have your list, you then need to nail down your offer. You do this by showing the reader what they get, and what they have to do to get it. Finally, the creative. This is the artwork and copy that makes up the direct mail piece.

If you had to break down the three key elements on a percentage basis, you should focus:

50% of your efforts on your list
30% of your efforts on the offer
20% of your efforts on the creative

In the end, you need to forget about reach and frequency, and aim for responsiveness. You do this with an offer-driven strategy with a strong call to action. Then you segment your new clients or customers by value, and treat them differently. Once you do that, you need to cross-sell. In McDonald’s terms, that would be “Do you want two apple pies for $1.00”? You also need to upsell. Again, using McDonald’s vernacular, it would be “Would you like to Supersize that for just .59 cents”?

Once you have done all this, you profile your best customers and then rinse and repeat!

10 Tips to Make Sure Your Advertising Rocks!

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The past week’s posts have been about two things, making sure your ads hit the intended target (your best clients or customers) and avoiding the pitfalls commonly associated with poor advertising.

If you don’t read anything else on my blog, this past week alone should save you thousands of dollars in misspent advertising and make you thousands more by pointing you in the right direction. If you have missed some of the action and don’t subscribe to the weekly newsletter recap, then this is what you have missed so far.

Construction Marketing Online – A Primer

10 Ways to Ruin Print Advertising

The Good, Bad & Mostly Ugly Part of Contractor Advertising

Why You Should Fire Some of Your Clients

Using Other People’s Money to Market Your Contracting Company

Today, as promised, I am going to give you the 10 rules for successful contractor advertising. They are:

  1. Users assume nothing and contact the companies from the ads that give them the most complete and useful info
  2. Ads that users identify with and can identify to receiving the benefits work the best
  3. Ads that are easy to understand, clear in content and have lots of open space
  4. Bullet points and lists are your friend
  5. Headlines need to be large, benefit-specific and between 8-10 words long
  6. Give plenty of reasons for people to do business with you
  7. Listing credentials and affiliations improve the response
  8. “Value” pulls better than “Cheap” or “Lowest Prices”
  9. Pictures and graphics that help the consumer relate to the benefits
  10. Seems obvious, but give people a reason to do business with you

At the end of the day, you want to make sure your advertising communicates the benefit to the user, is informative, easy to read and gives the reader a reason to call. If you can get these key ingredients into your advertising copy, then I assure you your chances of success are much better than those around who don’t!

Photo Credit: Jeremy Levine Design

Contractor Marketing Tip: The Swipe File

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Yesterday I went on a bit of a rant about the direct-mail company Money Mailer. And if you paid attention and read between the lines of that post there was a valuable marketing nugget that you could put to good use right away to promote your contracting company. If you didn’t read it yet, you can find the post here.

In my opening paragraph I said “As any good marketer will tell you, I will steal an idea from anywhere“. You see, many people say that there are no new ideas, just new twists on the same old ones.

This leads me to the marketer’s secret weapon… the swipe file

I collect direct-mail pieces, newspaper clippings, online ads and just about anything that has to do with advertising that I think is a fresh approach to the same old message and store them in a swipe file. Sure it helps to know the basics of advertising and marketing, but if you can say yes to the following question — would the ad make you buy the product or service – then you know you have a decent foundation to start with when writing your own ad copy.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with using other advertising to help get your creative juices flowing. Sitting down to write out ad copy is a pain in the ass, that’s why most of you are smart enough to hire knuckleheads like me to do it for you. What’s not okay is just lifting someone else’s copy verbatim or stealing the concept entirely. If you look around you will see it happening everywhere, you just have to know the difference between plagiarizing and imitating your competition. So start your own swipe file and put it to good use the next time you have to come up with an ad.

My Direct Mail Rant

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Warning — this post is a bit of a rant!

First of all, I like getting junk mail. As any good marketer will tell you, I will steal an idea from anywhere. But if you are a window company in the Philadelphia area and advertised in this month’s Money Mailer, you got screwed with your pants on. And by the way, I use the term “junk mail” for a reason.

Here’s why

I have a client who calls me the General Contractor of marketing. I guess they call me that because I work with many companies to help market the contractors I work with. I work with search engine marketing companies, I work with direct-mail houses, I work with newspapers and radio stations and TV and Yellow Pages people all the time. And nothing pisses me off more than when I see a company being taken advantage of by their marketers.

So today I go to my mailbox and I find this month’s Money Mailer coupon drop. Normally I look forward to getting the Money Mailer because I get coupons for the local pizza place my family goes to, and like I said, I’m happy to steal an idea from anywhere I can. So I review all the ads with a fine tooth comb.

In the pack, there were:

33 ads overall
14 ads were national accounts – ads for ADT, Dish Network and DirecTV
19 ads were local – Local businesses just like yours

Here’s the rub, of the 19 local ads, 8 were for window installation companies! Understand, they weren’t home-improvement companies that did windows along with other home services, these are strictly window installers, and there were 8 in the pack! Now, if I were representing one of the window installers I would have been furious! I know business is tough out there, but this was an obvious money grab by the local Money Mailer. And all they did was force the window guys into a bidding war with homeowners who will no doubt call many of them for quotes. It truly boggles my mind why they would allow almost 50% of their drop to be targeting such a specific segment in the home-improvement category. This truly was junk mail for these contractors!

What’s the solution?

Now, we don’t just bitch here at Darren’s house of useless knowledge, I have a suggestion for anyone out there faced with the same challenge. You have to go out of your way to find advertising that limits the number of ‘like’ companies they will allow. In other words, find advertising outlets that want to partner with you and see you succeed, not just make money for them.

This means every time you sit down with an advertiser you need to be asking them for some type of exclusivity. Many of them will tell you to go to hell in the nicest way possible, but you have to ask. Depending on your industry and your location, it might be worth it to you to buy the exclusivity. In other words, find out how much it would cost to not include your competitors. And if they tell you there’s no way to control the number of companies that you compete with, then ask for a steep discount.

And to Money Mailer – I like you guys and I have used you a lot in the past, but I have to call you out on this one because the only people who made money on this deal was you! If you think I am wrong, please let me know. But as a guy who does about $4 million a year in advertising, I don’t think I am.

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