It all started with a text.
“Hey Luke, you have time to talk this afternoon?”
The text was from a guy l’d known for 10 years. We’d spent a lot of time together. I trusted him. His name is Chris.
We hadn’t talked for a while though so the text was a pleasant surprise. It’d be good to catch up and share what we’d both been working on for the last six months or so. I texted back…
“Yeah, how ‘bout 2 my time?”
Later that afternoon we got on the phone. After a bit of back and forth catching up he asks me if I’m still doing any direct mail consulting. I tell him yeah, some.
In fact, I had a couple clients who were absolutely killing it, but I played it a bit cool to see why he was asking.
Then he asks if I could be in L.A. on Friday. This was Wednesday so I said, “Well that all depends, what’s this about?”
Then he drops a bomb. He tells me that several months ago he’d moved to L.A. to work with this guy. He was spending $5 million a month on Facebook ads. But he’d reached a limit on what he could spend profitably. He was starting to explore other marketing channels so he could keep his company growing.
He wanted to start testing direct mail and Chris recommended me. I had created a direct mail campaign for Chris several years before. That campaign launched his business to $100k a month within its first 60 days.
Anyway, he said this guy would pay my airfare if I’d get on a plane and come talk to him. Now, as intriguing as it sounded, I wasn’t leaving home without getting paid.
Chris says, “What’s your rate?” I tell him.
“Let me call you back,” he says.
I figured that would be the end of it. But 10 minutes later I get a text from Chris.
“Shoot me your wiring instructions and book a flight.”
I land Friday morning and take an Uber to the address Chris gave me.
The office is in a fancy-as-hell building right on Rodeo Drive.
When I walk into the lobby Chris is by the elevator waiting for me.
We take the elevator to the top floor (it requires a special key).
When the door opens I can’t believe what I’m looking at. It’s a phone room. But not like any I’d ever seen except in a movie.
Gleaming 27″ iMacs on every desk. There must have been 150 workstations. People standing or sitting at every desk talking into headsets. And the walls were all glass. The outside walls and inside walls.
There is a huge conference room in the center all walled in with glass. Not even a Hollywood set designer could have built a cooler looking office.
As we walk across the hundred feet of perfect office space, Chris tells me the guy I’m meeting with is on the phone. So I’m going to have to wait.
We sit down at Chris’s desk. He starts doing something on his computer.
Meanwhile, I start listening to the conversations the salespeople are having. They’re taking inbound calls. They’re spending 3-5 minutes asking qualifying questions. If the person isn’t qualified, they politely get off the phone. If they’re qualified, they start their pitch with a little education. Then they move fairly quickly into little trial closes.
The “product” they’re selling is some sort of self directed IRA with gold coins as the primary asset. I knew nothing about IRAs, gold coins, or even investments. But I wasn’t listening to what they were selling. I was listening closely to how they were selling.
After 45 minutes or so, Chris looks down at his phone then looks at me.
“Ok, he’s ready for us.”
We walk into the Boss’s office. He says hello to Chris and introduces himself to me. We all sit down.
The Boss says, “Chris tells me you know a thing or two about direct mail. Did he tell you about what we’re selling and who we’re selling to?”
I tell him what I’ve heard from Chris. I tell him about what I observed watching his salespeople for the last 45 minutes. Then I ask him what he wants. What his goals are with adding direct mail to his marketing arsenal.
He says he’d like to max it out. He goes on to explain how they are spending $5 million a month on Facebook and they’ve reached a limit. He wants to keep growing.
I ask him a few more questions to help me quantify what he means by “max it out.”
Then he grabs a stack of what I recognize as elaborate mail pieces from the credenza behind him. Looks like he’s been building a swipe file. From the stack he starts showing me examples of what he has in mind for the mailing.
I let him go on for 10 minutes or so. Then I stop him and ask two more questions about his existing marketing. I want him to explain out loud the process they’re using with the Facebook leads. And I want to confirm that I’m clear who his audience is.
After he finishes I say, “I know exactly what we should do with direct mail.”
“I recommend we mail postcards with a CTA of call now.“
I barely get the word postcard out of my mouth and Bossman starts laughing… loudly.
After he’s done laughing I ask him if the ads he’s using on FB are any more elaborate than what would fit on a postcard. He agrees, they’re not. Then I ask him why he thinks his FB campaign is working so well.
He says, “Simple, it’s all about the audience targeting.”
I say, “Ok, so if I can get the audience targeting right then a postcard should be enough to get a qualified call, right?”
“I guess so,” he says.
“Ok, what is your current CTA or offer with these FB leads?”
He says, “We offer them $2,000 dollars in uncirculated gold coins if they switch their IRA or 401k over to ours.”
I say, “Perfect, can I make the same offer on the postcard?”
“Of course,” he says.
“Great, let me go source some lists.”He had described in great detail that his customers were male, politically active, conservative Republicans, over 55 with at least a $250k net worth.
So I went to work sourcing Republican campaign donor’s lists. I instructed the broker to do selects for age, sex, and net worth.
The most important part of any direct mail campaign is your mailing list. I can’t stress this enough. Most marketing veterans will say the success of a campaign is 40% List / 40% offer / 20% creative. From my 30 years of experience I’d say it’s closer to 50/40/10.
Selects are criteria (usually demographic) that further qualify the people on your list.
Then I ordered 5,000 names for the test.
Next, Since I already knew what the CTA and offer were going to be (call us to claim your free gold coins) I started creating the postcard.
Here’s a sample of what I came up with. This one didn’t actually mail. It looked just like this but the addressee and the name on the front (check looking side) matched. And obviously it had a real phone number.
Next, I made sure they had all the right tracking in place.
It took a couple weeks of back and forth to get everything set up. After double and triple checking that we had the right phone number and it was being routed properly it was time to drop the test in the mail.
A few days later I get a call while I’m hiking. Normally I don’t answer while I’m in nature but it was a California number and I’d been expecting to hear that calls were starting to come in.
The call is from the sales manager.
He says, “Just thought you’d like to know, calls started coming in from your mailing today.”
“That’s good, how do they sound? Do we have something here?”
“Well we’ve only taken 3 so far.”
I say, “And, how do they sound so far?”
“The first one we took closed.”
“Wow, that’s great, how much,” I say.
“He’s moving $800k over to us.”
“Holy shit! That’s fantastic.”
By the time the calls stopped coming from that first mailing they’d gotten 213 calls and 8 sales.
They didn’t wait til the end of the test to drop more though. We started dropping 50,000 cards a week.
With digital marketing, scaling is sometimes slow and arduous because of the ad platforms. With this campaign we scaled almost overnight on that first list source and started testing new list sources to scale on at the same time.
This campaign is the perfect example of getting the audience (mailing list), the offer, and the creative right. When all three are dialed in, a campaign can go to the moon.
If a business is currently advertising successfully and they know exactly what they can spend to make a sale they could be a perfect candidate for using direct mail.
It’s as simple as sourcing the right mailing list and converting their digital ad to print.