Copyright MMVIII Direct-Response Network. All Rights Reserved.
Also by T.J. Rohleder:
The Black Book of Marketing Secrets (Series) The Ultimate Wealth-Maker Ruthless Marketing Attack How to Start Your Own Million Dollar Business Five Secrets That Will Triple Your Profits 24 Simple and Easy Ways to Get Rich Quick Secrets of the Blue Jeans Millionaire Shortcut Secrets to Creating High-Profit Products Fast Track to Riches Four Magical Secrets to Building a Fabulous Fortune How to Create a Hot Selling Internet Product in One Day Introduction Hey there! This is T.J. Rohleder of the Direct Response Network and M.O.R.E. Inc. and Ive got an exciting publication here for you to study. In its pages, I reveal 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets that can make you as rich as you want to be. How do I know that they work? Well, my companys been using them for 20 years and so far weve made over $110 million in our various endeavors. Not all of that money was earned through direct mail, but the great majority of it was. And though Im proud of that, Im not trying to brag here; Im just trying to show you how utterly effective, and protable, these secrets can be. Ill be presenting them in two main sections. Part I will cover what you need to do, while Part II will cover the specics on how to do it. Direct mail is the one thing thats has made us more money than anything weve ever done. When my wife and I rst started our business, we advertised in magazines like most mail order companies do. But we quickly switched to direct mail instead. We have this graph of when we rst started our business that shows our monthly sales gures. In the rst six months we were just doing space advertising, and yes, theres a nice, steady rise. When we started doing direct mail, though, the curve shot straight up like a giant mountain. While we were doing well in the beginning, direct mail is what made us millions of dollars. Thats why its so exciting to be able to pass along this information. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 3 Back when we ran our ads in a national magazine, we had the potential of reaching millions of people. Sure, that sounds great, but heres the reality -- how many people do you know who do more than glance at most advertisements? Not many. Then theres the competition you face -- you have to stand out or your ad will get lost in a sea of others like it. But when you take advantage of direct mail, you know your letter will go directly to your target a good 99% of the time. You dont know for sure whether theyll look at it or not, but youre denitely more targeted -- that is, you have more control over whether or not someone sees your advertisement. Youll put it right in their hands. They can read it if they want to, or they can trash it. The big thrill is that if only a small percentage of your market reads and responds to your ad, you can still make a prot, too. I believe that the best form of marketing, even after a century of use, is still direct mail -- a sentiment that at least 80% of the real pros in direct response marketing will agree with. Even in the face of print ads, TV ads, radio, and the Internet, theres no question about it. If you learn how to do direct mail properly, youre a mile ahead of the pack. In fact, youre a thousand miles ahead of the pack. The best news is that anyone who has their own retail businesses can use direct mail to boost their prots. Im enthusiastic about direct mail for three main reasons. Number One, there are millions of people that you can mail your offer to. Number Two, you can reach 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 4 these people for relatively small amounts of money. Number Three, you can get a super-fast return on your investment. For example: in one seven-week period a few years back, we brought in $400,000 on one direct mail campaign. Another time, a couple of years before that, we brought in over $2.5 million in just six months time on a direct mail cam paign. Obviously, this is a lot of money, very, very quickly. Again, Im not presenting these gures to brag -- I just want you to know the amazing potential of direct mail. In this publication Ill be covering twenty-ve of our secrets -- but within each of these topics are many more ideas that Ill explore. I truly believe youre going to nd hundreds of ideas here that can help you start making money immediately with direct mail. So lets jump in with both feet, shall we? 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 5 Part I: What to Do Lets start out with denition of direct mail: thats Secret Number One. A lot of people are unclear about what Direct Mail is. In fact, it can be so many things. Primarily, direct mail is a way of targeting a market by mailing out offers, thereby reaching customers and prospects by means of their physical mailboxes in a personal, one-to-one fashion. You might mail 100,000 pieces of direct mail -- sales letters, postcards, self- mailers, or almost anything else that you can put in the mail -- but you nevertheless aim your offer at one person. You should talk directly to that person in your material; thats what makes it immediate, one-to-one. We use direct mail for two things in our business. One is for attracting new customers; another is to get more business from the customers we already have. This is a simple strategy that takes one thing into account: the fact that marketing is all of the things that you do to attract new customers to your business. Then you simply resell those customers, over and over again, by creating additional products or services for them to buy. Direct mail is the best way that weve ever found to be able to go back to our customers repeatedly. Attracting new customers is the lifeblood of any business. This is Secret Number Two. Now, admittedly, the prots on new cus tomers will be very small compared to the prots you get when contacting and mailing your 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 7 regular customers. The new customer generally comes in at a slight prot or sometimes at a break-even point -- and sometimes even at a small loss. The big prot comes on the back end, where you consistently work your customer list and sell them new products and services. When youre dealing with new customers, you have to keep one thing in mind: they dont know you and they dont know your company. So youve got that hurdle to get over. Your repeat customers do know you. They know youre reliable and they know what kinds of products you send out, so old customers are always the best way to test new products. The way to get the new customers is to make a sensational offer, even if you dont make much of a prot (if any). Its done just to bring them into the fold. So when it comes to attracting new customers, people youve never done busi ness with, there are certain things that you have to do that are different. One of the ways weve effectively drawn new people in is by putting together initial offers that make it very easy for people to respond. Weve developed all kinds of low-end offers for new customers. We offer them something for free or for a low cost, which makes it easy to make that rst sale. Then we start building the relationship. You please them by sending them a package that they get excited about. They say, Boy, this company sent it to me quickly, and what they send me was every bit as good as or better than what they said they would send! Once youve brought them in that way, they have the great 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 8 possibility of becoming long-term customers. Secret Number Three is getting more business from your current customers. I think its extremely important for you to under stand something that someone told me when we first got started. This was just an analogy, but it really sank in for us: they told us that attracting new customers is like pedaling a bicycle uphill, whereas doing more business with the customers you have is like coasting that same bike downhill. Ive thought about that quote many times since I heard it, because its the gospel truth. Its much easier to do more business with people who already trust you, since the relationship is already established. The big prots will always come from the current customer list, the repeat customers. Theyre the solid gold of your direct marketing business. Sure, you always have to have lead generation programs in place to bring new customers into the fold, but never, never forget your best customers. You have to treat them like kings and queens. Why? Because it costs so much money to get a new customer. Many years ago, for example, my colleague Russ von Hoelscher interviewed Howard Ruff, the newsletter publisher. Ruff was selling newsletter subscriptions to his Rough Times for about $99 each at that juncture. Russ asked Howard, What does it generally cost you to get a new $99 subscription to your newsletter? Ruff shot back immediately, Almost $150 to get a $99 sale. Then he laughed and he said, Yeah. Its a good way 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 9 to lose money, isnt it, Russ? Russ asked him, So whats the secret, Howard? Now, he had a pretty good idea what Mr. Ruff was going to say, but he explained it very well. He said that although it cost about $50 of his own money to get a new subscriber, good customer service generally prompted them to buy additional books and services. He also had coins, gold, and other things hed sell them. Plus, when they renewed their subscription for $99, it probably cost him less than $10-$12 to service that second-year subscription. He was willing to lose $50 in the beginning in order to get a new customer. That should open your eyes as to the value of a customer. Once you have a customer, you can continue to mail to them at a very low price. People whove read a lot about direct response marketing, or who have been to a few seminars, know that one of the main success principles is to mail to your customers often -- but most people dont know what that really means. I think its as simple as offering them special sales and new products that you develop especially for them. (Incidentally, thats Secret Number Four, the million-dollar formula that were going to talk about in more detail later!) You can nd all kinds of things you can sell to your customers. Thats what everybody wants to know: What do I sell to my customers again and again? The answer, simply enough, is to keep your eye out for related products 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 10 -- products like the ones youve sold them already. Develop new products in that vein. Go out to other entrepreneurs and ask them, What do you have in this particular eld and what kind of a good deal can you give me? I want to sell this to my customers. By doing this, you can get a constant ow of new products, services, books, or whatever the related product is because you want to continue to sell to a person whos likely to buy. Whatever people buy habitually is the product you want to sell. Thats a good, strong marketing concept. If somebody has a hobby or an interest, or theyre buying some specic type of product, theyre perfect candidates for buying more of that same kind of product. Its almost as if people have an insatiable need to continue to buy things. A gun collector wont be happy with just one gun; they have to have two, then four, and then eight. People who buy books on making money get into the habit of buying more. Like Eugene Swartz says, If youre selling diet books, the mailing list you want is someone whos bought a diet book in the past 30 days. There are plenty of those kinds of lists out there and all kinds of media available for you to use to reach people. Secret Number Four, which I alluded to a minute ago, is our million-dollar direct mail formula. Its the way we come up with winning products for the front end. Now, I dont know how we developed this; we may have read about it, or it may be a truly original idea. In any case, we use a simple four-step formula. One, we develop 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 11 a product for our customers. Two, we write the sales letter or direct mail package. Three, we send it out to our best customers. Four, if our best customers go crazy over it (which means we make a lot of sales), we roll it out to the rest of our customers. Then we start testing to outside lists because we know that this is something our best customers were super-excited about -- which means that millions of other people will potentially be interested in it, too. Once you get a customer and fulll the order, put something extra in that order. A good catalog, brochure, or yer will get you a lot of bounce-back orders. Youre going to have a happy person if youre selling something good and inexpensive on the front end. So, the next thing to do, within two or three weeks (or less), is to send a solo mailing to that customer offering the related item. That customer has you fresh in their mind; hopefully they have warm and fuzzy thoughts about you because they like what you sent them in the rst place. Theyre a great candidate to buy something else, if you mail to them quickly. I dont want you to get the false idea about what Im trying to say. A lot of the product ideas that we come up with just plain dont work. When were just barely able to make a prot selling something to our best customers, we know that we have a dud on our hands. If the people who do the most business with us dont go absolutely crazy over it, nobody else will, either. But all we need is 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 12 for about one out of every ten new ideas to work out really well. Then, by rolling it out to our customer base and doing what we call ne tuning, you can roll out then to millions of other people and thats how to get rich. Im going to talk a lot about the specic details of what ne tuning is in Part II of this publication. The point is, if an idea wont work with your best customers, forget about trying to make it work with people who dont know you. One thing I need to add here is if it does work with your best customers, then you should test it again to the outside list before doing a full- edged rollout. Sometimes things work well with your best customers, but not to the rest of the list -- and if youre foolish enough to do a full rollout, you can lose a lot of money. For some reason, those people who know you will buy from you and people who dont know you might scratch their heads and say, I dont know. You never roll out with something until youve made it as good as you possibly can. Secret Number Five is segmenting your customer list. One of the most important things that we ever did was to divide out our best customers from the rest of our customer base. Your best customers (the family jewels, as we call them) are the multiple buyers. Theyre the people who respond on a regular basis to your offers. They may not buy everything you send them or accept every offer that you make, but they buy consistently. They make three, four, ve, or six purchases a year. They become your 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 13 multiple buyers. Theyre the best of the best of the best. By putting them in a segment by themselves, they become your #1 source for testing new offers. Then, behind them, but still very important, are the customers who make an occasional purchase from you. Theyre your customers on a somewhat irregular basis. Then, of course, you get down to the one-time customer who came in on a very low-priced offer. You might even have a few people who came in free. If you dont hear from such a customer after making repeat mailings to them, then theyre really not your customer; theyre just somebody who bit on a free offer. It quickly stops becoming protable to mail to them. Finally, you can also segment your list by different products that people buy and even by the amount of money they spend. At M.O.R.E. Inc. any customer who spends more than a certain dollar amount with us has proven that theyre qualied to be in our group of preferred customers. This also helps us get rid of the expensive people who dont buy anything. We decided, Anybody who spends this much money with us has proven that theyre qualied to be on our preferred customer list. Anyone who spends less than this other amount we wont send any more mail to. Eventually, that last group has to be dropped from the list. Thats the one technique thats meant more to us than anything. When we talk about making $400,000 in seven weeks, thats the group of customers that we made it from -- the frequent 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 14 buyers. Its all part of the 80-20 principle you hear so much about -- though I think its more like 90-10. In any case, the idea is that a certain segment of your customers (it may be as few as 10%) become the multiple buyers, the people who buy 80%-90% of what youre selling. Theyre the customers who love you and your products and, of course, you should love them back. Theyre the ones who are the absolute core customers. Theyre your best customers. Youve got to treat them like kings and queens. Theyre the ones who will tell you whether new offers are likely to work or not. Secret Number Six is developing relationships with your cus tomers. I know a lot of people are confused about that and want to know what it really means. Well, think of it this way: it means that the customer thinks about you as a real person, not as a faceless entity, and you think about them that way, too. You may not know each other personally, but still, you have a relationship. The way you develop that relationship is through your communications, whether its by sales letters, postcards, brochures, or whatever youre using to reach that customer. You have a way to communi cate with them that makes them realize youre a lot like them. My wife Eileen did that so well. People realize that here is a good woman in Kansas. Heres a woman who came from just a few steps above poverty and has climbed up to great success! Shes a woman who wants to take thousands of people 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 15 with her down the road of success. So, when Eileen communicates with people all over the country, they get the feeling that shes someone they can trust. Heres a real person to like. I always try to do that myself. I try to be accessible by phone and email to let people know, Youre a real person and Im a real person. I really care about you. I want to make money, but I also want to help you. Even when Im not accessible, I have a whole staff of people who are. My staff will take the time to deal with anybodys problems. Thats one thing that really helps out our customer base. Think about most mail order companies, mail order dealers, and direct response marketers. I hate to say this, but Im going to because its true: they dont want to communicate with the customer. They wont take their phone calls or they dont have a staff dedi cated to helping people. They want to keep everything at arms length. Sometimes they dont even have a high regard for their customers. I know of several people who are selling garbage products and theyre really scam artists. Ive met them at various seminars or conventions. They have such a low opinion of their own prod ucts and such a low self- esteem. They also have a very low opinion of the people who buy from them -- and thats just a terrible way to do business. You need to treat people right: give them good 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 16 products, give them good customer service, and be personable with them. Also, you need to develop a good offer that really applies to them. You can do it in a page or a postcard, or you may need a sixteen page sales letter that explains exactly what youre offering, whats really good about it, and how it can help the person whos reading it. Dont try to use all the hot buttons and tricks of a great ad writer. Just make a great offer in simple terms that a person can understand and respond to. Always try to treat your customer as you want to be treated: thats one key to success. Another is staying in constant touch with customers so that they dont forget you. You should always be sending them something. A lot of people will hear this and say, Well, my goodness, this is just simple common sense. Others will ask, What does this have to do with direct mail? You see, good customers are like money in the bank, but its money that has to be mined. Everything you do to and for your customers helps build that relationship. You cant go see the customer like a salesperson would do and have that relationship built on a one-to-one basis; you use direct mail as a substitute for that. Secret Number Seven is building or acquiring a good mailing list. Now, lets talk about what it actually takes to build a mailing list. This is something a lot of people are confused about. They hear that they should be mailing to their customers six or seven times a year and they hear that their customer mailing list is so vitally 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 17 important that its worth its weight in gold. But they dont know how to build it and its crucial that they do so. The way to do it is to compile it from all the people who order from you or send inquiries to you. You build it from your ads in newspapers and magazines. You build it from postcard decks. You build it from anyone who gets in touch with you who wants information about your products or services. You build this mailing list, also, by doing direct mail to get other business. You use lists from other people. Its their list, but anyone who replies to you then can go on your list. Now, I do want to offer a caveat here. When you use other peoples mailing lists, make sure youre dealing with a good, reputable list broker. You should be getting names that are right for the offer you have. Stay away from cheap lists. Sometimes youll open up an income or money-making opportunity magazine and nd that people are offering very cheap lists. Well, years ago, I tested some of those lists. They didnt work well at all for me and they usually dont work well for anyone I talk to. Sure, they only cost $20-30 for a thousand addresses so people think, What a bargain! Well, when you throw in the cost of postage and printing, a cheap list that doesnt produce isnt a bargain. It ends up being very costly. To nd good mailing-list brokers with good lists, check with the SRDS: the Standard Rate and Data Service. They offer a manual that contains all the mailing 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 18 lists in the country that are for rent -- or at least all the reputable lists. Id say there are over 40,000 different lists in this huge directory, all broken down by market. You pick the market that youre most interested in (for us, it would be the opportunity seeker market) and check that section in the SRDS. Youll nd a list of relevant lists, along with the names of the brokers or the list managers. Youll see the same names cropping up repeatedly in every market. There are several list management companies that are dominant in those markets. Thats the recommended way to nd good lists. Whats really exciting is that there are literally thousands of categories. You could be looking for health, diet, people who have bought books on losing weight, opportunity seekers, or whatever. Once you nd names in those categories and nd the list managers or brokers, you also get a pretty good idea as to how successful the promotion is. Somebody might say, I have a list on How to Lose Fifty Pounds in Fifty Days. Now, if you had a diet book and you nd another list and nd that in the last three months there are 25,000 names on that list, then you should also look into getting that diet book and seeing whats in it. See how you can modify your offer because the SRDS not only gives you all the lists that are available, but they also tell you something about how successful your competitors are. Its a great way to get inside information. Some of the brightest minds in direct response marketing go to the SRDS even before they start a new project to see, How big is the universe? How many 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 19 people have bought a product or service similar to what I want to sell? That will tell you whether you want to go ahead with this project. Youll nd dominant list managers or brokers within every market. Those people possess inside information as to which lists are working for their clients. These people can make you a fortune because they know, out of all of the different opportunity lists, which ones are the most powerful, which ones work the best, and which ones make their clients the most money. They can steer you to those lists so that when you rent those lists and mail to them, you make a nice prot, too. If youre in the opportunity eld, you have to know two names: Stuart Cogan in California with Mega-Media Associates (the group we use) and Howard Linzer of Macromark in New York City. These are two of the biggest players, the folks who can tell you which lists are working the best. Youll also need to know the difference between a list manager and a list broker. A list manager is someone or some company that actually maintains your mailing list; a list broker is someone who works with the different list managers and brokers through these outside list managers. Some people are both; they go back and forth. You might have Stuart Cogan or Howard Linzer acting as managers of certain lists, but they can also act as brokers who can get you any list, even the ones they dont manage. Some companies are strictly list brokers; they can get any list on the market because theyre part of a 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 20 broker network. Others are list managers; they manage certain lists only. Now, no matter where you get a list, you should test it to make sure its going to work for your offer, especially if its a new list. That brings me right into Secret Number Eight: the importance of testing. We do an amazing amount of testing at M.O.R.E., Inc. Sometimes people think that the direct response marketing business is like gambling and, yes, theres some truth in that. You cant know, from the beginning, which ads or sales letters are going to work the best. Some people look at this kind of marketing the same way theyd look at gambling with their money in Las Vegas. But thats not the way to look at it. If you test properly, you can spend very little money to nd out whether your proposition is going to work or not. Testing is the key to getting rich. You nd out what works and what doesnt. Take, for example, a project we did a few years back. Since we were comfortable with the lists we used, we did a huge test -- 50,000 mailings. Now, Id never recommend that to somebody new, but weve been doing direct mail in this particular market for a long time now so we know which lists are working. We tested ten different sales letters that all sold the same offer. It was a front-end offer that we were using to attract new customers. The only thing that was different about these letters was the front page. We tested new headlines, new front-page formats, and so forth, trying to nd out which letter worked best. It 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 21 was a rst-class test, so the results came back very quickly -- in a matter of weeks. Just as we gured, one or two of those letters out-pulled the others by a ve-to-one margin. Isnt that incredible? With that same offer, but with a different opening paragraph and a different headline, we created results which varied by 500%. In that case, we also tested some different layout designs. Five of the letters had great big, bold headlines on them along with Eileens picture; ve of the letters had whats called a Johnson box, where theres no picture and no real headline to speak of. We found that the letters with Eileens picture out-pulled the letters without it. That brings me to another thing. You can test all kinds of things: not just headlines and copy, but also layout designs or the use of photographs versus no photographs. Any number of these things can signicantly increase your response. Of course, I would have predicted that Eileens photo would work because not only is she a good looking woman, but using a photo of the ad-writer personalizes things. Another thing you can test is letters with underline marks and colored text (especially red, green, or blue). Weve done a lot of underlining. You can even test white paper against a colored stock; in fact the list of all the things you could test is endless. The main thing to remember is that direct mail is a personal medium: it goes directly to peoples homes. Its in their mailbox with the same good stuff thats coming 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 22 from their friends and loved ones, the folks who send them letters, birthday cards, and so forth. Our mail goes right in that same mailbox where all that good stuff goes -- so the more you can make that direct mail look like personal mail, the better your chances are to get it opened. Among other things, you should always test a plain rst- class mailing with nothing but the return address. Sometimes we use just the address and the state, not even the name. One more thing Id like to point out before we go on to the next secret is this: many of the best list brokers and managers make you take at least 5,000 names from any category on any list that youre renting. Thats okay; you dont have to mail to all of them, especially if youre starting on a limited budget. In fact, its a bad idea if you have no idea as to the actually quality of the names. The broker might have told you that these names are great and he might really believe that. If you take those 5,000 names and mail to 2,000 of them and get a good response, you can mail to the other 3,000. If you dont get a good response mailing to 2,000 (or even as few as 1,500), you can throw the rest of them out. This has saved many of our clients money when they were in the start-up mode. Remember: if you have a product to sell, dont assume youre going to do great with a list just because someone else did. Try mailing to one-third of those names and, based on that, decide whether to mail the rest of them. Lets say you do that, and your promotion really 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 23 works. Well, Secret Number Nine is rolling out the product. Rolling out is the thing that can really make you rich. Heres how it works. Lets say we test a few thousand names each from ten different lists. Lets say, as often happens, that three of them work really well, two of them so-so, and ve of them, frankly, just dont work very well at all. Now, what we want to do is consider a roll out with the three that work. That doesnt mean that if the lists are big (thirty, forty, or fty thousand), were going to take all the names. Some people get a good test and when they go back for more names, they get bombed. So, lets say we mailed a few thousand and it worked well. Wed go back then with 5,000 or 10,000 of the 30,000 names that (in this particular example) are available. If that worked, wed go get the rest of the names and do the complete roll out. With the marginal lists, wed probably try to get a couple thousand more mailed just to retest it. If it seemed to work a little better, wed start to take more from those lists. Of course, if the lists dont work well in our test, just forget about them. This is one of the reasons I happen to think that this is the worlds perfect business. Its the only business I know of that you can actually lose money on nine different things and still make a fortune on that one thing that works, the one thing that you can roll out with. Think back to the example I provided earlier, where we were testing ten different front pages. When you do a test like that, youre hoping to nd one superstar, the best of the best. When you do, the other nine can be discarded and 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 24 you can proceed with the one that does ve times better than the others. Thats a lot better than just taking the best idea we have and running with it because it looks good. We might end up missing out on ve times the money we could actually make. The key to making millions of dollars is as simple as making hundreds of dollars. If you can make $100 net prot from mailing 1,000 pieces of mail, then you know that youve got something very powerful. That same $100 grows to $10,000 when you mail 100,000 pieces, and $100,000 for every million pieces that you put in the mail. For example: I worked with a guy in Seattle many years ago who was making an offer to show people whod just gotten their real estate licenses how to be better real estate salesmen. He did a small sample mailing to about 200 of those new licensees, all on his own. It wasnt a very good sales letter and it was a very small sample. He called me up later and said, You know, we made about $125 and, of course, thats not very good. But I guess theres some interest in this. I asked him, How many people get their licenses in real estate? This was back in the late 1970s or early 1980s. He told me, Well, nationwide, I think in any given year there might be 300,000 or 350,000. I told him, Youre going to make a lot of money. If you mailed to 200 people and made $125, Katie-bar-the-door! Use a better sales letter and with mass mailings done by a mailing house, theres going to be no limit on the prots. He went on to make hundreds of 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 25 thousands of dollars. So like I said, the key is to nd out how to make a hundred dollars. You can easily then make $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 and more. Its the exact opposite of gambling. Find out how to make a little prot and then just multiply yourself. Secret Number Ten is to use inexpensive direct mail. At the beginning of this publication I discussed how direct mail can encompass all kinds of things. Some of the more inexpensive types of direct mail include postcards, inquiry-generated letters, and similar products. The postcard is one of the best vehicles to use for lead gen er ation. You have to make a very inexpensive or free offer. You tell them just to return the card to you, with their name and address, or to call a phone number and give their name and address. A lot of people use the double postcard (which is twice as big) to sell front-end projects in the $15-25 range, but I still think the postcard should be used for inexpensive or free offers. My own experience tells me that that is better. Also, there are card packs offered by companies like Advo, Venture Communication, and Doyle Publishing that go to hundreds of thousands of people. Youre not really doing the direct mail, then; youre just supplying an ad they can mail out. An inquiry-generating letter is very simple: its a small sales letter thats usually just two to four pages and includes some type of an ordering device. It could be an order form or just a response card where the customer 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 26 lls their name out and sends it back. We use a lot of inquiry-generating type of letters to go out to people weve never done any business with. We make it very easy for those people to send us a small amount of money or to show us in some other way that theyre interested in our offer. This is another inexpen sive way to mail because you dont have all the long sales letters, the list pieces, and all the circulars and brochures and that type of thing to deal with. Postcards or inquiry-generating letters are the best ways to generate leads. The power of it is that youre mailing to people who dont know you. When you make them a great offer for just a few bucks or you offer them a report absolutely free, theyre not afraid to invest in getting to know you. Its only going to cost a couple bucks or its going to be FREE. That is how you can build con dence. Of course, then, the key to success is to send them a very compelling sales message or sales letter immediately once you receive their inquiry. One of the things that we do to make sure that we convert them is to offer something we call a marriage offer. This is to make sure were getting inquiries that we can turn a nice prot on when we sell what ever we have on the back-end. A marriage offer is very similar to the sales piece that we send people when they respond. Its like that front-end lead generation message that were sending out to attract those new customers. What happens is that the customer is already half-sold when they send 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 27 us that initial $5, $10, or $20 or even when the customer just sends back the card saying, Yes, Im interested. Weve qualied those customers because the package that we send out is very similar to the one they responded to in the rst place. The key is to send it quickly. Im amazed, when working with some direct mail clients, to learn that they only mail out their follow-ups once a week -- or every couple weeks. This is nonsense. If you get an inquiry on Monday, the response should be in the mail no later than Tuesday morning. Thats something that weve done from Day One. Thats the one thing we refuse to test. We refuse to hold onto an order for a couple of weeks and see how much less response we get. I know that thats partially responsible for our success. You dont have to test that one; thats written in gold. The faster you respond, the more condence you build in your potential customer. Secret Number Eleven we learned from a book called Secrets of Direct Mail by Dick Benson. In that book, Dick talks a lot about costs of mailing versus how much money you can make. One of the things he says is that it doesnt matter how much a mailing costs. Many times you can spend more money on a mailing and generate a lot more than you could by trying to cheapen it up or by trying to cut corners, like so many people new to this business try to do. Its too common in this business for people do everything on the CHEAP. They get the cheapest names, they get the cheapest printer, they use the cheapest envelopes, or they buy plain envelopes and stamp them with a rubber stamp. They do things that just 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 28 shout out to the potential buyer, Small time, Ma and Pa, Watch out! This is a very rinky-dink dealer. Its such a crying shame because thats going to prevent them from getting orders. This is one of the worlds perfect businesses because you can just be a small one-person company working from your kitchen table. But you can present the image of being a huge company just by doing a few simple things like using high-quality paper and working with a good graphic artist. There are very simple things that can be done that can give people the impression that youre much bigger than you actually are. It pays rich dividends. Nobody wants to deal with someone who looks like theyre just a little part-timer. Even though theres nothing wrong with that, especially in the beginning, you dont want to shout that from the rooftop to all your potential buyers. You want to look like a big, well-established company. Heres another helpful factor: give your business and individual products good names. Heres an example of something a fellow named Ben Swarn did. Many years ago, he started an astrological association called the American Association of Astrologers -- and at the beginning he was just working in his basement in Canton, Ohio. What happened is it became a huge organization, but it started with those humble beginnings and he gave it a good name. So, giving your company or your products great names is important. Using good letterheads and 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 29 good printing to put forth a good image is also crucial. If youre selling a high-priced item, you want that initial sales package that goes out to your customers to have really nice stuff, a nice cover letter or a nice brochure. This is to make yourself look like youre worth sending that money to. One of the ways weve done that at M.O.R.E., Inc. is by means of Secret Number Twelve: working with a good mailing house. A lot of people dont even know what a mailing house is. First of all, there are mailing houses in almost every city in the country. Were here in the middle of nowhere, Goessel, Kansas, and within an hours drive of here, we have huge mail houses. All you have to do is look in the phonebook under Advertising Direct Mail. These companies can do all kinds of things to help give your direct mail a good, solid look. Theyll stuff envelopes for you mechanically and put them straight into the mail. A lot of people think, Well, that must be expensive. I recently talked to a client who just did a 10,000-piece mailing -- just himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law stufng envelopes and mailing them out. He was telling me that he was bone-tired and was so upset because it was just a mountain of work. I told him about a letter shop, a mailing house, that could do the work for him. He went and saw them. He found out that he could have gotten the job done for the same price, or less, and it could have been done in one day -- instead of the week he, his wife, and his sister-in-law spent at it, working their ngers to the bone. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 30 Now, you do need to watch everything closely. You cant turn over your pieces to a mail house without keeping an eye on them. There seem to be some black holes in the United States Postal Service system and, of course, you need to keep an eye on your mailing house and how they handle things. Until you really know your mailing house, you have to keep checks and balances with them -- and even once you do get to know them, it doesnt hurt to check things occasionally to make sure everythings still working smoothly. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 31 Part II: How to Do It In the last section, I covered twelve principles of direct mail marketing and now Im going to cover the other thirteen. The real difference is this section is that Im going to show you exactly what you have to do to put together all you learned in Part I. Remember, these are the same ideas that have made us and thousands of other people around the country millions of dollars. So lets get right to it, shall we? Secret Number 13 is simply this: become familiar with direct mail math. Direct mail math is very simple: all it involves is adding up the cost to get out a mailing. The two chief components of that cost are usually postage and printing. Now, if you run an ofce with employees like I do, then you do get into overhead and a few other expenses. But basically it all comes down to postage, printing, and perhaps the rental of mailing lists. When you add up the cost, usually, you do it per thousand. How much does it cost you to mail a thousand pieces of direct mail? That amount could be $400 or $500; it could be more determined, in part, by whether youre mailing rst- class mail or by bulk-rate mail. You just multiply up the numbers; you know exactly what it costs to put a thousand pieces in the mail even if youre mailing ve, ten, or twenty thousand pieces. The other side of the direct mail equation is: How many orders do you get per thousand and how much gross 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 33 income do they bring in? Then you go a little bit farther and look at how much it costs to fulll every order. How much does it cost to ship the book, the product; how much is postage, and whats the cost of the envelope? What does it cost to get that order to the customer? So you add up how much it costs to mail, add up the results, and then add up how much it costs to fulll. Of course, if you dont know the results at rst, you still can do direct mail math, just by determining how many orders youll need to cover your expenses. This way you always know exactly what you have to do to generate a prot; you always know where youre at. You can look at the numbers every single day. Around our shop, we sometimes watch the numbers every hour or two when were doing a big promotion. We take a lot of phone orders so we always know exactly where were at all times. Thats crucial. If you have a lead generation program where youre giving a free report away, or charging a very nominal fee for a report, tape, or whatever, then of course the direct mail math switches into a different mode, one where your prots have to come out of the back-end. But again, its just a matter of doing the math; its just simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication. You know exactly where you are at all times. Thats exciting because it allows you to make decisions on whether to roll out or pull back and rework the package. And then, usually, after you get the whole thing put together, you have a formula where you know that a return envelope cost you this much money and the sale yer costs you this much money. Then you 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 34 just keep that formula in all your future direct mail packages, as long as costs remain steady. It becomes very easy, after you do this for a while, to know exactly what your costs are. Because direct mail math is all simple, basic math, it also helps remind you of how crucial it is that you buy your envelopes and your printing at the lowest possible price, while maintaining good quality. Thats crucial: you must maintain good quality. Avoid false economy, but dont be afraid to shop around -- because if you can save $50 on printing per thousand and you eventually roll out with 100,000 pieces, thats $5,000 saved. Money saved can be money earned. Even if you only save a penny on each piece, youre talking about some serious money if youre sending out 100,000 pieces in a mailing. One more thing about direct mail math: when you decide to price your product and services, you should test the market by using different prices. Several years ago, our friend Russ von Hoelscher put out a real estate offer (a manual and some tapes) and tested them at $49.95, $59.95, $69.95, and $79.95. He was amazed to learn that $69.95 was by far the most protable offer. He did get more orders at $49.95, but not enough to compensate for that extra $20. The surprising thing was $69.95 did much better than $59.95; not just with prot, but with many more orders. So always test, test, test -- and price testing is one of the most important things to test. Youll be amazed, sometimes, how you might have to lower your 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 35 price to get the most orders and to get the overall best return. Many other times, youll be amazed to nd that you can charge much more than you thought you could! The key is to get something going very small. Again, test it slowly so youre not investing a whole lot of money in your direct mail campaigns. Youre just spending a little at a time and nding what works. Then, know that when you roll out, part of direct mail math is guring out how many millions of dollars you can make. Thats whats really exciting. If you have an offer that works to 5,000 people and makes you even $500, thats exciting because if theres a potential universe out there for your products -- and by universe we simply mean if theres potentially, lets say, a million people out there that you can mail it to -- then you just can start multiplying that $500 per 5,000 all the way up to a million. Of course, there are variances. Some lists work better than others. Theres just no end in sight of what you can do once you nd something thats protable. Basically, what Im saying is that you need to get your fulllment costs down. You need to get your mailing costs down and keep track of those so you can nd your break-even point. With us, sometimes its 100 or 200 orders before we nally break even. Once we pass that mark, then its all prots - - except for fulllment. It all gets back to something I talked about in Part I. Figure out a way to make $50 or $100. With direct mail, you could actually take that to 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 36 $100,000. You could take it to $1,000,000, as long as the mailing list universe is big enough to handle extensive mailing. Secret Number Fourteen is creating powerful offers. This has a great deal to do with the success of any direct mail campaign. In direct mail, the mailing list you use (whether its yours or an outside list that you rent) is your single most important component; but next to it, theres nothing more powerful than making a good offer. A good offer has something to do with a good product and service, but it goes beyond that. It means that you actually format an offer thats easy to understand, thats exciting, thats motivating, that gives all kinds of benets to the reader, and excites and motivates them to head for their checkbook or to grab their Visa or MasterCard. If you learn to make powerful offers, theres no limit on how much money you can make. The secret is to study the good mailing pieces of others in the eld. Get as many books as you can on the subject of direct mail. Read some of my other publications. Also, subscribe to certain newsletters on direct marketing. Learn how to craft an offer because theres nothing more important. Think of the customer. Think of what his wants and desires are. Think about how to make a proposition thats irresistible. Make it so you feel that the person just cant turn this down if theyre interested in the subject matter at all. And of course, your mailing list should be targeted only to people who are likely to be interested. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 37 Here are a few important points about crafting an offer. First of all, you need to make your offer very reader- friendly. Have an envelope enclosed with the offer. Have an 800-number where they can call and place an order. Make it really easy for them to order. I believe the order form should always be separate from the sales letter or the brochure. Make it easy for them so they dont have to cut it with a scissors or anything; they can just take it and mail it. Next, you need a powerful headline or lead statement. Now, when we talk headlines, were usually talking about ads, but Ive found (and many others have, too) that you can use a headline in a sales letter. You put a big, powerful headline up there, then drop down and start with the regular letter. It works like a Rolex. What should your headline be? Oftentimes, it should be something to do with How-to -- thats a proven formula for making money using ads or sales letters. For example: How to Make $5,000 a Week or How to Look Ten Years Younger in Thirty Days. You can also use a news headline and you can keep in mind who, what, when, where, why and how, the classic newspaper approach. You can also tell a story. This is something that you may not want to do at rst, but if you study how other people have done it, you can learn to tell a story. By telling a story, I mean a personal, truthful story about how you came to make this offer to your customer. Tell something of your past, keeping it interesting: what youve learned, what youve discovered, 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 38 what came to motivate you to write this person today. Telling a story can be very powerful and it can really make the offer personal. Then, make a bold statement: Pay Zero Taxes, for example, is a bold statement if you can back it up with your copy. Anything that hits the person over the head and captures their attention makes a good headline. This brings us to Secret Number Fifteen: writing dynamite ad copy. Ive already mentioned the importance of a headline and how it can even be used in the sales letter. Now, if you dont use a headline in the sales letter but you want to keep it completely personalized, then you need a very powerful, compelling copy in the opening statement which becomes something like a headline. The key to writing good copy is to stress benets. Have a lot more yous than Is. Really put yourself in the mindset of the reader, try to push their buttons, and get them motivated by what youre saying. You do that by stressing the benets completely. Just lay out as many benets as you can. Try to keep it personalized. Talk to that person. You might be sending out 100,000 direct mail pieces, but you should be dealing with each person whos reading your letter with a one-to-one approach. A sales letter always goes into a direct mail package, even if you have yers and other brochures in that package. The letter is still the most important. Dont split your message. If you have yers in there, as well as the sales letter, make your top 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 39 benets and your top pitch be in both the sales letter and the yer. You want to keep things consistent; people dont like big paragraphs and they dont like long sentences. Keep it short! Whenever possible, offer some freebies. People love to get something for free. If youre selling something for $100, $500, or $50, whatever the price is, you can offer some paper-and-ink freebies, at least a couple of them, and theyll cost you maybe twenty-ve cents each. This will always enhance the return because people like to get those bonuses. All the bonuses have to be in some short report format, as long as they have good information in them. Another important thing is to use testimonials whenever possible because people like to know what other people say about your product or service. Another key element with a sales letter is a postscript -- a P.S. With the exception of the introduction or headline to the sales letter, nothing gets read more than the P.S. Always add a postscript to every sales letter. Remember that good sales letter writing is just salesmanship in print. Youre telling the prospect (or the customer, because a lot of our mailings are to existing customers) about all of the things that are in it for them, communicating that to them in the best possible way. I realize a lot of people are afraid of writing. I was; I used to be extremely scared of it. But a lot of people go about it the wrong way in the beginning. I think that when most people think about writing ads or sales letters, they think 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 40 about the vehicle too much. They think, perhaps, about how they have to be clever. They have to be smart. They have to be shrewd. They have to somehow trick somebody into buying their product or service. Well, this is absolutely balderdash. Nothing can be further from the truth! The secret to writing a dynamite sales letter is simply to be honest and friendly, but nevertheless, to stress all the big benets. Anyone can learn to write good sales copy, if they just remember this: you just want to communicate with people pretty much the way you would across the back fence or how you would if you were sitting down talking to somebody over a cup of coffee. Forget about being cute. Forget about being shrewd. Forget about trying to trick somebody into ordering, or using all the hype and all the magical words like amazing and tremendous. Sure, som e times we use these words, but only in their proper contexts. The main thing is to communicate very honestly. Stress the benets. Come across very sincerely, yet be enthusiastic. You can write a great sales letter without considering yourself to be a great copywriter. Some copywriters make the mistake of trying to be brilliant when they write when, actually, the key to success is to be down-to-earth and honest. Too many times Ive seen sales letters that are too crowded; theres no white space on them. Well, sales letters need to be reader-friendly. Secret Number Sixteen involves the outer envelopes. For years and years, Ive believed and Ive 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 41 preached a plain-Jane simple white #10 envelope. Thats the standard business envelope. Its the best. Dont use teaser copy on it. Many great copywriters believe that way, though others believe that teaser copy can work. Ive come to realize that in many cases, Im right -- that plain- Jane envelope was best. For other offers, some great copywriters have done a great job by smearing the whole front of a 6 x 9 or a 9 x 12 large envelope with about fty benets. Sometimes thats worked. Rodale Press, which publishes Prevention magazine and a lot of health books, is fantastically successful with this approach. Some of the Stock and Gold newsletter nancial publishers also use a lot of teaser copy -- so you really have to test both approaches. I think if youre mailing rst-class, and youre mailing with a live 42-cent stamp or the imprint (that is, youre going through the meter), I think its still best to use the regular, white envelope and just have an address as a return. Dont even include a name. Then, put the customers name, address, city, state, and zip on the envelope. You should denitely test both plain and teaser copy envelopes when sending bulk mail. Weve found that with our front-end direct mail packages, its better to use no teaser copy, just a plain envelope. With our customer base, we always have my photograph, sometimes well put teaser copy on it, and it works pretty well. Thats because when youre mailing to your customers and have a good relationship with them, you want them to know this mailing is coming from you. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 42 Plus, we spend more money on envelopes for our existing customers. In fact, with our best customers, well spend tremendous amounts of money per thousand because its an investment for us. These are people weve established a relationship with so we can spend a more money to reach them with a rst-class offer. Im talking about a huge sales letter. A lot of the envelopes we use for our customers are the hard envelopes, the expensive kind that look just like Federal Express envelopes. These are called Direct Mail Express or Urgent Response envelopes and theyre very colorful; sometimes theyll even have eagles on them. They look like UPS or Federal Express envelopes and are coming on the scene more and more. They pull very well because they capture peoples attention. Although you may be just mailing rst-class or bulk rate, many of the people getting these envelopes think theyre receiving an overnight communication. Secret Number Seventeen is lay-out. Its important, as Ive already mentioned, to have a congruent letter that seems to ow. That is, it needs to have short paragraphs, short sentences, and a lot of white space to make it reader-friendly. I think thats the key to success with a sales letter, especially a long one. People ask us, Will people read a 12- or 16-page letter? The answer is Yes, as long as that letter is reader-friendly. If a customer looks at it and sees a whole mess of type with hardly any breaks, most will say, Im not buying into this. If it looks easy to read, people are going to read it - - especially if the opening sentence and the headline 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 43 capture their attention. We like to circle certain ideas in our letters with a color thats different from the text color. We underline things to make them stand out. We do things to make our letters look personable. Now, the customers not ignorant; they know these letters were printed out by the thousands by huge printing presses. Still, we try to do things to make our letters look friendly by using handwritten notes in the margins and similar methods that give it a personal feel. Also, we work with a good graphic artist. This has been one of the things that has helped us more than anything - - working with somebody who understands the importance of how to lay things out to make them look the best. Plus, we get lots of ideas by looking at other peoples mailings. Its common for people to throw away direct mail; they call it junk mail. When youre in the business, though, you should never throw your direct mail away. This is how we get some of our best ideas -- by studying other peoples mail. Thats the concept of the swipe le, which is something you should institute immediately when you start in this business. You should especially take a close look at mail you get over and over again because thats how you know theyre successful. Whatever theyre doing is working, so you want to look at how they craft the offer. You want to know what type font theyre using, along with the range of variances. How does their entire direct mail piece look to you? You can 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 44 learn a lot from that because you dont study failure. You want to study success. A lot of companies that do direct mailings -- especially the ones that send out letters about subscribing to nancial newsletters, newsletters on gold and silver, or newsletters on stock market and mutual funds -- spend huge amounts of money on the very best freelance graphic artists. They test dozens of different approaches, trying to nd the one that works the best. Even though Ive been doing this myself for so many years, I continue to learn from the approaches of these newsletter publishers. Theyre using very sharp copywriters and theyre using a very strong, hard sale. It takes a very strong sale for a newsletter. Whenever you can get any information on newsletter offers, save them because theyre among the best. Russ von Hoelscher is a member of the NRC, the National Republican Committee, and he tells me he gets letters from them at least three times a week. Every one of their letters is made out the same way. Its very clear and precise. You can get it, see exactly what they want, and what the money is going for. You know theyre spending gobs and gobs of money to have those letters written. Its amazing, really, how the Republican Party is really up on direct mail. I believe theyve hired some of the best talent available because I, too, am getting three and four approaches a week. Theyre sending me the Dollar Bill Letter, which is an eye-grabber. Heres how 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 45 that works: you staple a dollar bill to the sales letter. This, incidentally, is something that, on short mailings or small mailings, you can do, too. Its costly, but if the offer is high-priced enough, the results are just amazing. Some of the best direct mail Im receiving is coming from Conservatives and the Republican Party. Theyve apparently learned a lot. Now, on to Secret Number Eighteen which is working with printers. This involves finding a good, competent printer who does what he says hell do at a good price. You should constantly be checking with different printers because you want quality; but in direct marketing, you also have to have good price. The difference between printers can be the difference between twelve noon and midnight. Some are, quite literally, charging two and three times as much as others. You really need to shop, shop, shop, and find those printers with the different capabilities. They dont all do the same things. Sales letters are one thing, brochures another, books yet another -- so find the right printer for the job that needs done. There are some printers who can give us the best price for short runs, which is great, since we do lots of small tests. Then, on roll outs, where were mailing 50,000-100,000 pieces at a time, there are printers that can give us better prices for those jobs. So you need to have a wide variety of printers to work with -- and always go for the ones that can give you the best service, reasonably good quality, and, of course, low price. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 46 One more thing before we move on. When Eileen and I rst started, we knew nothing about working with printers at all. The rst printers we worked with were quick printers. First of all, we had a cash ow problem; we didnt have very much money. What we would do is this: every day we would get orders, and when we needed some more sales letters or whatever, we took all the money we had to spend that day, went up to the quick printer, and they turned these jobs around for us super fast. This is a great tip for small jobs: there are printers out there that can do very fast work for you and turn it around in a matter of hours. Sometimes theyd print our sales letters while we waited. As you grow, youll need other printers that can do other jobs. For instance, we have book printers whose specialty is printing 500 to 1,000 books. We have other book printers whose specialty is printing 5,000 to 10,000. Thats the key: to nd the printer that can do the job. The instant printer is for something you need quickly. The printer who can do a brochure for you may take a little longer, but they do a good job at a reasonable price. Then, you may need different printers for booklets, manuals, or perfect-bound books. Secret Number Nineteen is to use guaranteed space ads that you know will pull. Whenever you run an ad, you have to tie up your money six to eight weeks in advance unless you can get credit. All that time, you never really know if the ad is going to perform or not. One of the things that weve done is test all kinds of headline ideas through direct mail. We can test different offers and 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 47 different story formats. Through testing these things, we nd out what works best and then we develop our space ads around those ideas so that we already know exactly whats already proven to make us the most money. We utilize those ideas in our space ads. If you have a good sales package thats working in direct mail, its always a good idea to take its best points and then add a very good headline to them when you start crafting a space or display ad. If its working well in direct mail, theres a good chance that you can make it work in space. This takes some of the risk away because space ads can be very risky. You put up a lot of money and then wait for weeks or months for it to appear. Youre rolling the dice, in a sense. But once you know somethings working in direct mail, you can condense that copy and theres a very good opportunity, if you pick the right publications, that youll have a good space ad. Now, I want to say that with a space ad (youve heard this before, but I want to hammer it into your mindset), the headline is crucial. Its at least 50% or 60% of the value of the entire potential pulling power of the ad; some display ad experts even say 70% or 80. So, experiment with headlines in your direct mail. When you nd the best one, try it in the space ad. I want to tell a little story here. When we rst started out in this business, somebody came up to me and said, I saw your full page ad. That ad must have pulled in millions of dollars. One thing you need to understand is that one ad cannot pull in millions of dollars. Youre 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 48 lucky to get ten or twenty times the ad cost and even thats very unusual. Often if you get double your ad cost, its successful. So, you need to place more than one ad in different magazines. You have to realize that its a process and this idea of getting rich on one ad -- or on one direct mail campaign -- isnt realistic. Secret Number Twenty is this: good copywriters can make you rich. Now, there are a lot of copywriters out there that specialize in mail order and direct mail. Some of these copywriters, like Russ von Hoelscher, dont come cheap, so if youre starting on a shoestring budget, you cant really hire a copywriter. But once your business has progressed to the point where youre making some money, or if youre starting a business with some capital, its smart to get a good copywriter if you feel you dont know enough to do it yourself. Dont go to a local ad agency. Youre likely to get a direct mail package or space ad that will absolutely bomb, mostly because its not set up to appeal to a nationwide market. You have to nd a good direct response copywriter. You can check in various publications like DM News to query two, three, or four of them. Pick the one whose budget you can handle and whom youre compatible with. A good copywriter wont cost you money; theyll make you money. Also, theyll add leverage to your business. When youre doing every thing, you dont have time to really sit down, study, and learn how to write all the ads yourself. If you hire an outside copywriter to help you on certain 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 49 advertisements or sales pieces, that adds a lot of leverage to your business. Keep this in mind, too. A good copy - writer should use his talents and make money for himself, but also, in many cases, he can do just as good or an even better job for you because he looks at things from afar -- hes not too close to the trees to realize that hes in a forest. A good copywriter will pay for himself. Some copywriters offer a service called critiquing and this can be something that can make you a lot of money. Most do this fairly inexpensively because the same level of work and effort isnt required for them to sit down and critique a piece of copy, whether its a sales letter, a space ad, or card deck. This is where weve saved a lot of money at M.O.R.E., Inc. Many times, one of the best copy writers will charge $400 or $500 to look the piece over and make a couple of recommendations. Those two or three recommen da tions can make you many thousands of dollars, even tens of thousands of dollars, over a period of time. For example, if you want to get Russ von Hoelscher on the cheap, the best way to do it is to send him ads or direct mail packages that are already out there where he can critique them and tell you how to make them better. You can get small ads critiqued by him for less than $200, full page ads for less than $300, and direct mail packages for $400. Its a good way to get expert advice at ten cents on the dollar. It denitely worked wonders for us. When we starting working with Russ, we wrote our own full page 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 50 ad. We spent many sleepless nights putting that thing together, then we sent it to him to critique and he made some fantastic adjustments to it. While weve always liked to have as much control over everything as possible here at M.O.R.E. Inc., I dont recommend that for everyone. For some people that would be a terrible thing, though Eileen and I have strived since day one to learn how to write copy ourselves and to learn these skills that are necessary in direct mail communication. One of the problems that weve had since the beginning, though, is being able to go to people that we havent done business with and to be able to bring in sales. Weve been somewhat ineffective at that, to tell you the truth, and have been forced many times to use outside copywriters because we havent been able to write to those prospects. I dont know exactly why that is, but once we have a customer weve done business with, I suppose it just feels easier for us to write copy to those people. Quite possibly, it stems from the very personal way we write copy. Our method clearly works best when were writing to people who have done business with us, that have a relationship with us. When we go out to outside markets, we have to take a different approach. Then, once we bring them in as customers, we can go back to them in this more personal way. Maybe its the fact, too, that the new customers that were trying to bring over into our customer base think our letters are hokey because were too down-home. But 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 51 whatever the reason, the fact is that we use a lot of different copywriters to do our front-end pieces. Some of these copywriters do a better job than we could ever do ourselves. They make us money, paying for themselves many, many times over. Were constantly running new promotions that bring new customers in, but once thats accomplished, we take it from there. On the back end, we handle all of our promotions. But have no doubt about it: Copywriting is hard work. If you can afford it, pay someone to critique your work, or even write those promotions you have trouble with. Secret Number Twenty-One is the power of pyramiding your direct mail prots. This is where people get rich. Its simple, really: you just nd something that works and then you take those prots and use them to make more prots. You get your cash ow owing right through your business. Now, the key to that is to not spend the money as it comes in. Some people immediately want to spend the money that comes in and buy things that theyve been looking forward to getting their hands on. Instead, at least in the beginning, pyramid the prots. If you can roll over every dollar of prot and hopefully double it in a set period of time, its easy to see how you can go from a small investment to a small prot to a larger prot to, eventually, a gigantic prot. The way to do that is to pyramid the money. Thats why you shouldnt quit your job and jump into this business. Start spare time, on a small basis, while you still have another job -- so you dont have to take the money out of your direct marketing 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 52 business in the rst several months. Weve always taken 30% out of every dollar that came in and set it aside for advertising so we can just keep that river owing. Weve run two checkbooks where one is just for our advertising budget. I dont even know how we got the idea for doing that; its something thats always helped us more than anything else because we make sure, on a daily basis, that theres always plenty of money to put back into the advertising, which is going to make us even more money. Its exactly the opposite of gambling. Gambling is where you take something, cross your ngers, throw it out there, and hope it works. All those people who wish they could run an ad in the National Enquirer, with its six million readers, and think that a million people are just going to send them a buck -- well, thats gambling. They never know if their product will even sell in the National Enquirer. Their ideas arent based on these good, solid principles Im trying to teach here. People think, Gee, the National Enquirer has six million readers. Now, if I can just get one out of a hundred of them to send me $20... Of course, it never works out that way for a tiny ad. You go by bottom line prots. Dont get this pie-in-the-sky idea that if ten million people each would send you $2 youll have twenty million dollars because thats not realistic. Speaking of bottom line prots, Secret Number Twenty-Two is something thats made us huge amounts of prots. The secret is renting out our mailing list. When 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 53 we rst got started, we esta blished a contact with a mailing list manager. In six years we generated over $500,000 in cash and its only grown since then. The nice part about this is almost all that money has been pure prot for us because weve already made a prot on the mailing list. Anything over and above that just goes straight to our pockets. Anybody can do this. Once you have at least 3,000- 5,000 names, you can make some serious money on the side -- just by making your names available to a list broker who will rent them out to other companies. When you get a check from them, almost all of it is pure prot. No matter what market youre in, there are specic list managers who you should be working with. If you get your list up with the right manager, theyll do a very good job working around the clock. Our list manager is on the West Coast. Sometimes Ive called him late at night and hell still be there working. Because theres an hour difference, Ill call him at six oclock in the morning and hell be there working. (Ill forget that hes two hours behind us.) The point is that he works around the clock renting our mailing list out for us, doing all kinds of work, and we dont have to do anything but make sure that the names we send him are the very best names. Of course he keeps a percentage, but it doesnt cost you anything - - he takes it out of your prot. In our experience, the key to a good mailing list is this: rst of all, put together the very best names possible. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 54 In other words, only put up your buyers names on the lists you rent out. We dont put up any inquiry names, only the names of people who spent a certain dollar amount with us. Second, when we do take new customers, we do such a good job at trying to satisfy those new customers that I feel like theyre more open and receptive when other companies rent our mailing list. Thats why these companies keep coming back again and again to rent our list, because the people on that list are happy, satised, and willing to buy from other people. Its also important to maintain a list of names that you wont rent to anyone, no matter what. As I mentioned in Part I, its vital to segment your mailing list. You take your very best customers and you keep them separate from your other customers. You dont want to give your best customers away to any other company. You can make so much more money by doing individual marketing campaigns to those people. Secret Number Twenty-Three is keeping a swipe le, something Ive mentioned already. There are so many good ideas out there. Sometimes people say, How do you guys come up with all your ideas? Well, the truth is that were not geniuses. Every time we see anything thats of any value that somebody else has put together, we save it in what we call a swipe le and we use as many of those ideas as we can in our own stuff. The swipe le is one of the keys to direct mail success because you want to know what other people in your particular 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 55 industry are doing. Its exciting to get the mail, but you have to organize and categorize it, otherwise you go crazy. I used to throw it in boxes and then eventually Id go crazy trying to look for a certain piece because it was buried with 300 other pieces. Try to keep things in order, but absolutely save the mail and look over what all these other offers are so that you can structure your own offer better. Dont copy them word for word; heavens, no. Just try to glean a few good points and ideas from some of the best letters. There are so many out there that you can adapt to your own use. Heres what I mean. Some copywriters have charged companies $10,000, $15,000, and more to write their material -- and some have earned even more for their work. A lot of those full page ads youll see rerunning over and again in the major tabloids, like the Enquirer, the Globe, and the Examiner, are written by copywriters who are paid not only their base pay but also residual income they get off any profits. Sometimes these writers are paid well over $100,000 for writing a full page ad! So these are the very best of the best ads that are out there. From the headline ideas and the layout ideas, theres just so much good material that can be learned. With a swipe file, youll have the benefit of looking at their copy, studying it, and, perhaps, picking out a key point here or there to use in your own offers -- and you dont pay them a cent. So its a very, very smart idea to have a swipe file of other peoples ideas around. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 56 Secret Number Twenty-Four is to make effective use of the USPS, the United States Postal Service. I know a lot of people say bad things about the Post Office, but we love them -- mostly -- because weve made so much money by using their service. There are some problems, though, so in a way you could say its something of a love-hate relationship. The people that work for them are basically good people; however, the system is flawed, I think, simply because theyre often not in touch as much as they should be with their customers on a national basis. Yet, with all their problems, they do a better job than just about any other postal service in the world. Its like America. We have a lot of problems, but very few of us want to trade our beautiful country for another. The best way to stay out of trouble with the powers- that-be in the USPS -- the postal inspectors and such -- is to ship your orders when you should, take care of business as you should, give refunds if you say you will, and obey the laws as they pertain to all types of offers. Stay away from chain letters and similar garbage that can get you in trouble. Work closely with your local post ofce if youre doing bulk mail. They can show you ways to save a lot of money and theyll tell you exactly how they want to receive the mail so they can get it out quickly. Do everything that you can to be a good customer and theyre going to treat you much better. Even better, establish a close relationship with a mailing house that works with the Post Ofce, so you dont have to. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 57 One thing I want to add before I go on to our 25th and nal secret is this: If somebody calls your shop and tells you they didnt receive their package, you need to ship them another one -- immediately. You need to make sure your customers have that order in their hands no matter what. You can usually depend on companies like UPS and Federal Express to get their packages where theyre supposed to go, but with the postal service, weve found that a small percent of packages get lost on a regular basis. Often those packages are sitting somewhere else, unclaimed. So, thats one thing you have to be very cautious of: make sure you always ship them a new one if its lost in the mail. Now, on to our last tip, Secret Number Twenty- Five: just remember that all this gets easy after a while. The reason I listed this one last one is because sometimes, I think, people are overwhelmed when they hear all these ideas. The truth is that in and of itself, there can be an awful lot of things to learn about direct mail. But eventually you start to internalize them and it gets easier -- in fact, it can become a fun, challenging way to make money. Sure, it sounds complex at rst. You think, My goodness, I have to learn 101 things. But thats okay -- just learn them at your own speed. Eventually things just fall into line. Its so exciting and it can be so protable. It offers a wonderful way to enjoy nancial freedom and control over your life. As your condence grows, so will your income. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 58 Knowledge is a great way to beat your fear. Thats what this eld is all about -- learning everything you can. 25 Direct Mail Success Secrets That Can Make You Rich 59