There is a certain mindset in direct marketing folks. We are result oriented. We find it difficult to just go out for a drive for the sake of going for a drive. We want a definite destination, an estimated time of arrival, and a purpose for the trip. Most direct marketers have trouble watching a sports telecast unless they’ve wagered on the game. We want to KNOW if we have won or lost, succeeded or failed, achieved something definitive or just wandered around. While this tendency gets in the way of a friendly family game night, it is extremely useful in avoiding the vagueness and lack of accountability that permeates most business owners’ marketing activities.
It is this habit of thought that informs.
There Will ALWAYS Be an Offer or Offers
A key distinguishing characteristic of direct marketing and Direct-Response Advertising from all other marketing and advertising is the presentation of a very specific offer or offers. Ideally, yours is a Godfather’s Offer—an offer that the appropriate prospect or customer for you can’t refuse! We’ll get to the architecture of offers in a few minutes, but first the overarching ideas: one, to make your every communication actually ask somebody to do something, and two, to inject new disciplines of selling and accountability into all your communication with prospects, customers, and the marketplace at large.
If you begin paying attention to advertising and marketing, you’ll see that most of it merely shows up and talks about the marketers and advertisers, but does not directly offer something specific to be had by immediately and directly responding. A lot of print ads and TV commercials and brochures now include websites or Facebook sites where you can go like ‘em, etc., but present no Offer as a compelling reason to go there. All this is undisciplined. It is sending money out to play a backyard game with no rules, and worse, no score-keeping, no clear means of judging victory or defeat. A chaotic mess. When you take this undisciplined approach and simply spend and hope and guess, you’re at the mercy of opinion about your marketing—do you like it? Does your mother-in-law like it? Do your customers say nice things about it? Try paying any of your bills with that sort of feedback.
This all changes with direct marketing.
Direct marketing imposes discipline. That discipline may be as important and valuable as the benefit of direct response itself. For some mysterious reason, business owners are willing to let advertising and marketing off the hook, but tend to hold everything else accountable for results and return on investment. If they tie up money in certain product inventory, they expect it to sell—or they refuse to restock it. If they employ a sales representative, they expect him to make sales. If they buy a delivery van, they expect it to start and run so it can make deliveries. If they pay a laborer by the hour, they expect him to clock in, be there, and work for the hour. Yet investments made for marketing are permitted to skate. Only direct marketing imposes discipline, by always making an offer or offers, so response to those offers can be tracked and measured, injecting factual accountability.
My old speaking colleague, one of the all-time greats, Zig Ziglar, always described salespeople who wimped out at closing sales and directly demanding orders as “professional visitors,” not professional salespeople. Since you will be doing selling in print, online, with media, you rarely want to let it be a professional visitor on your behalf. Fire all the wimps. Demand real performance. So your task is to incorporate a direct offer each and every time you put out a message, of any kind, by any means.
I mean of any kind. By any means. We teach most business owners to use Thanksgiving greeting cards and/or New Year’s greeting cards, with past and lost as well as active customers, clients or patients, and, often, with unconverted leads too. We also teach no greeting card should arrive without being accompanied by an offer. Typically, the offer will be a gift with visit to showroom or store, gift with purchase, gift for referral, etc., placed in a printed piece inside a separate envelope, inside the greeting card itself, to preserve some separation between the thank you or new year sentiment and selling. But we are not shy about our purpose in life either, and it is not merely being professional visitors.
In short, you have a fundamental governance decision to make. Will you let yourself be persuaded or bullied into wasting money on marketing that cannot be directly held accountable for results and return on investment? Or will you insist on accountability?
My speaking colleague of some 40 events or so, the late General Norman Schwarzkopf, famous for Desert Storm, said, “Shined shoes save lives.” He meant that establishing and adhering absolutely to minor disciplines ensured soldiers could and would adhere to vital battlefield disciplines. Norm believed that a person can’t be undisciplined about some things but disciplined about others any more than an alcoholic person committed to sobriety can occasionally have a few drinks. You either are or you aren’t. Your business is either run in a disciplined way, or it isn’t.
Discipline is a central theme of all business success. Last year, 2017, was the 80th anniversary of widespread embrace by successful entrepreneurs of Napoleon Hill’s works Laws of Success and Think and Grow Rich, the summary of findings from his 30-year investigation into key commonalities of over 500 of the industrialists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and financiers who built America. In Laws, he detailed 17 such principles; in Think and Grow Rich, 13. Two of these are: accurate thinking and organized effort. Of a more contemporary nature, you might be familiar with Michael Gerber and his E-Myth, which is all about organized systems in business. One of the most successful of all buyers of and investors in businesses, Warren Buffett, has an absolute discipline for evaluating companies, and he has stuck to it with religious conviction. Top-performing athletes in every sport always exhibit a far greater level of discipline for everything from study to practice to actual playing of their game than the mediocre majority. The most successful authors past and present do not write whenever they’re in the mood—they have a self-imposed discipline mandating a set number of hours or completed pages every day. Anywhere you find significant success, you will find imposed absolute discipline. Undisciplined, unorganized advertising and marketing “effort” is not going to defy this fact of success.
Resource Alert!
THE book entirely devoted to comprehensive imposition of success disciplines to a business is No B.S. Guide to RUTHLESS Management of People & Profits, 2nd Edition. The book entirely devoted to comprehensive imposition of success disciplines to an individual is No B.S. Guide to Time Management for Entrepreneurs, 3rd Edition.
There are basically two types of offers. There is an offer requesting purchase. There is also the lead-generation offer, asking only for a person to, in effect, raise their hand, to identify and register themselves as having interest in certain subject matter and information or goods or services, and to invite further communication from you. Often, although not always, the lead-generation offer is free. There are times and places for both kinds of offers, but no communication should be devoid of some offer.
The Direct Purchase Offer
Online media like Groupon or hybrid offline+online media like Val Pak coupons deliver some of the simplest, most straightforward direct purchase offers, like “Buy One, Get The 2nd One Free”—used by everybody from pizza shops to window replacement companies. I am not a champion of discounting as strategy, and a co-author, Jason Marrs, and I provide much more sophisticated approaches in our book No B.S. Price Strategy. But for illustration purposes, this is a direct purchase offer you’re very familiar with and may be using now in your business. Another common direct purchase offer, in place of or combined with discounting, is gift with purchase. These were birthed by direct marketers but have migrated to retail, service, professionals, and B2B, so they are commonplace. They should be and usually are married to a hard deadline. They certainly provide easy opportunity to accurately measure their effectiveness and production, although out of ignorance or sloth, many business owners fail to measure.
Direct Purchase Offers have several significant disadvantages. One is that they tend to sacrifice price integrity and profitability, and if relied on too frequently, train customers to only respond when a “great deal” is offered. Two, they can only be responded to by people ready and able to buy right this minute—they fail to identify people likely to buy in your category in the near future. Third, they can be easily and quickly comparison shopped, especially if you are conveying the offer online. Still, business does revolve around Direct Purchase Offers.
The Lead-Generation Offer
This is a more interesting kind of offer, because it can substantially reduce the waste factor in advertising, convert a sales culture to a marketing culture, and provide opportunity to build trust and create a relationship.
You see lead generation done by direct marketers routinely and regularly. You may not have given them much thought, but now you will. They are commonly used by national direct marketers, but rarely used by local, small businesses—even though the national and local firms may be in the same product or service categories. For example, a company like Premier Bathtubs, which sells walk-in bathtubs that are safer for elderly people, advertises just about everywhere, offering a free information kit with brochures and a DVD. Once somebody raises their hand and registers themselves as interested in making a home’s bathroom safe for themselves or an elderly parent, the company has a marketing opportunity. Oddly, you will almost never catch a local remodeling company duplicating this strategy. Instead, they tend to leap to offering an in-home estimate for work to be done. This is often A Bridge Too Far.
The Important Concept of Threshold Resistance
Arnold Taubman, one of America’s most successful mall developers, spoke and wrote at length about the concept of Threshold Resistance as it applies to entrances to retail stores and window displays of retail stores. I find it applies even more broadly to direct marketing (see Figure 2.1 on page 18). All offers fall somewhere on a continuum between Low-Threshold Offer and High-Threshold Offer.
FIGURE 2.1: Threshold Resistance
Here are examples of offers that would fall to the right of the middle, toward High Threshold:
Chiropractor |
Free Exam |
Financial Advisor |
Free Seminar |
Remodeler |
Free Estimate |
Restaurant |
Out for a Meal and Experience That May Not Prove Pleasurable |
These score toward High Threshold because they can be scary and intimidating to the consumer. They require people to put themselves in uncomfortable positions. They require a decision nearly made, to get care, to find an advisor, to get remodeling done. A great many people with evolving interest or interest that can be stimulated will still not be prepared to take this big of a step forward.
Examples of offers that fall at the High Threshold are:
Chiropractor |
$29 Exam |
Financial |
Advisor Free Private Appointment |
Examples of Low-Threshold Offers
The lowest threshold offer is for free information, to be sent by mail or FedEx, or accessed online. This is the staple item of direct-response advertising, in virtually every category of business. The largest wealth management firm, Fischer Investments, on TV and radio, in Forbes and other magazines; one of the most successful home improvement product manufacturers, SunSetter Awnings, by direct-mail and blow-in inserts in magazines and newspapers; one of the biggest health insurers, Humana, in TV commercials; virtually all of the retirement communities advertising in the Where to Retire magazine; my client, High Point University; my client, ExcellenceInOrthodontics.org—all offer low-threshold, information items like books, free reports, DVDs. If this is their number-one strategy, why shouldn’t it be yours? Keep in mind, these are big, national direct-response advertisers who have plenty of opportunity to run split tests often, and do, and keep returning to the tried-and-true, low-threshold, free information offer.
I have coined the term “Information First Marketing” for this. Really savvy local business operators are embracing it, modeling the national advertisers. This is a wave of change, not just in the way businesses advertise to attract new customers, but in what they advertise. The karate school doesn’t advertise itself, its lessons, or a free lesson. Instead, it advertises a free report by its owner: The Parents’ Guide to Cyber-Bullying and Bullying: Raising Emotionally Strong Kids. The mattress store doesn’t advertise itself, its mattresses, or some sale of the century. It advertises its free guidebook: Why You Can’t Seem to Get a Good Night’s Sleep. The IT consultant doesn’t advertise his services. He advertises a free book: You Are the Target: Cybersecurity Before It’s Too Late.
Consider a very ordinary business—a funeral home. Most funeral home advertising is very basic: name, location, years in the community, list of services. The only offer is implied: when you need us, we’ll bury you. But even a funeral home can create and put forward a low-threshold, information-based, lead-generation offer that begins a relationship, builds trust, and establishes preference in advance of need, like this:
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“19 Financial and Estate Planning Tips for Responsible Family Leaders,” call our free recorded message any time at 000-000-0000.
It will be sent by mail, no cost, no obligation.
There is no law that says you must choose just one of these approaches.
Most advertising dramatically suppresses possible response by presenting only a single reason for a response. Typically, this is a High Threshold Offer that requires somebody to be 99.9% ready to buy now. Nobody’s coming in for a $59.00 exam unless they are 99% ready to put a chiropractic physician to work on their back pain today. But a lot of people suffering with nagging or episodically reoccurring back pain, who are having evolving thoughts about doing something about it, would respond to a Low Threshold Offer of information about “True Causes and Best Ways to Relieve Nagging Back Pain—Without Surgery or Drugs.” You don’t have to be dead or have a dead family member in the parlor to respond to a High + Medium + Low Threshold, i.e., three reasons to respond ad for the funeral parlor. It can present the usual stuff—here we are, here’s what we do; if you have an immediate need, call this number anytime 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and one of our professionals will be immediately available to assist you—but also present the previously shown Low Threshold Offer, and a Medium-High Threshold Offer, too, as shown here:
For a free “Pre-Need Planning Kit” and Audio CD,
“19 Financial and Estate Planning Tips for Responsible Family Leaders,” call our free recorded message any time at 000-000-0000.
It will be sent by mail, no cost, no obligation.
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To be clear, here’s what I’ve introduced you to here:
1. The use of offers
2. The difference between Low and High-Threshold Offers
3. The use of Lead-Generation Offers
4. Single Reason to Respond vs. Multiple Reasons to Respond
Once a business owner understands these things, his objection is often about a possible trade-down of response. The fear is that somebody who might call or come in or otherwise respond to a High-Threshold Offer and make an immediate purchase will trade down to a Low-Threshold Offer and delay his purchase or be scooped up by a competitor. While this does happen, it usually affects far fewer people than a business owner fears, and the improved total response and value of leads captured for development more than makes up for what little trade-down occurs. After all, the person who fell off a ladder and has to crawl to the phone isn’t gong to trade down from making an appointment with the doctor to requesting a free report or DVD delivered days later by mail. The person with a dead body is unlikely to trade down from immediate assistance at the funeral parlor to booking a tour next Thursday. In most cases, you can safely add Low-Threshold Offers without significantly compromising response to a High-Threshold Offer designed for the person ready to buy right this minute.
Ultimately, your decisions about the nature of your offer(s), where they fall on the Low- to High-Threshold continuum, whether or not they feature information, whether they are for lead generation or immediate purchase activity or a hybrid of the two are situational. Different media, different markets, different timing will color those decisions. You should realize you have choices and you can make your marketing dollars work harder for you by offering people more than one reason and more than one means of responding to you. But no matter what you make of these choices each time you must make them in putting forward marketing, your pledge of honor to Rule #1 must be: there will always be an offer or offers.
There Will Be a Reason to Respond Right Now
Hesitation and procrastination are amongst the most common of all human behaviors.
If you are a mail-order catalog shopper, you have—more than once—browsed, folded down corners of pages from which you intended to buy items, set the catalogs aside, and never placed the orders. This happens with every marketing media. People watching a TV infomercial almost buy, but put it off, to do the next time they see it, or jot down the 800-number, to do it later, but later never comes. A shopper enters the mall, sees an outfit she likes, but tells herself she’ll stop and look at it and probably get it on her way out. By the time she has walked the mall, had lunch, bought other items, and is headed back to the end of the mall she entered at, she is focused on getting to her car and getting home. The dress spotted on arrival is left behind.
We must be sharply, painfully aware of all the potential response lost to such hesitation. The hidden cost and failure in all advertising and marketing is with the Almost-Persuaded. They were tempted to respond. They nearly responded. They got right up to the edge of response, but then set it aside to take care of later or to mull over or to Google the next time they were at their computer. When they get to that edge, we must reach across and pull them past it. There must be good reason for them not to stop short or delay or ponder. There must be urgency.
At Disney World, at the parks’ closing times, they need to get everybody out quickly, for they have much work to do during the night, to be clean, fresh, restocked, and ready to re-open on time the next morning. If they offered transportation from the parks to the hotels, resorts, and parking lots until everyone was accommodated, people would stroll, loiter, find a bench to sit on until the crowd thinned. But there are posted and announced times for the last bus and the last boat. Thus there is urgency. (Further, they switch from gentle to up-tempo music, dim lights first in the back sections of the park, and have cast members with flashlights waving people along toward the exits.) They undoubtedly empty a park faster by at least an hour than if they created no urgency and let everybody meander out at their own chosen pace. Southwest Airlines figured out how to get their planes boarded much faster than other airlines by issuing colored boarding cards but not assigning seats, so each group is in a hurry—sometimes a stampede—to board, to get the best remaining seat. They create urgency. No, these are not marketing examples, but they are excellent demonstrations of the role that success or failure at creating urgency has in every kind of business.
Direct marketing can often contextually provide opportunity to create urgency of immediate response. This can be done with limited supply, limit per household or buyer, the countdown clock you see on a direct response TV commercial or a webinar. If the product itself cannot be limited in supply, some bonus or premium attached to it certainly can be. In the seminar business, a place I live and work, we use the obvious devices like “early bird discounts” and extend-a-pay monthly installments tied to a deadline to motivate early registrations. But we also use bonuses, entries into prize drawings, backstage-pass opportunities, preferred seating, closed-door, limited-number luncheon tickets available only to the first 50 or first 100 to beat the deadline in order to create even more urgency. Retail mimics this with the “door buster sales” starting at 5 A.M., 6 A.M., or 7 A.M., and can increase that urgency with a gift for the first x-number to be there with noses pressed against the glass. Disney creates false limited supply by bringing a product like a movie DVD, in their language, “out of the Disney vault just until Halloween—then it goes back in the vault and can’t be had.” They periodically bring the same product out of the vault, run the same short promotion, return it to the vault, wait until consumers have forgotten about the promotion, and then trot it out again. All these examples are about creating a context for urgency of response.
Direct marketing can also structurally provide opportunity for urgency of response. Anytime a group dynamic can be applied, a stampede effect seen, an “act now or lose out forever” reality displayed, a higher percentage of people presented with an offer will act than will under any other circumstances. People are motivated to buy what they will not be able to get if they don’t buy now, even when they would not buy now if relieved of that threat of loss. An auction is a prime example of this, and it has successfully been moved to online media—with live auctions and with timed auctions on sites like eBay. Putting people “live” into a seminar room where a persuasive speaker makes an offer from the stage, citing limited supply or discount or gift only for the first x-number, and having people see the stampede of earliest responders rushing to the product table at the back of the room is hard to trump by any other means and impossible to perfectly replicate by any other means; however, we’ve learned to come close with live online webinars, where viewers can see the earliest buyers’ comments, the “ticker” recording the purchase, the countdown clock for the closing of the shopping cart ticking away, and in live webinars, we can recognize by name the fast buyers. A direct mail, fax, and/or email sequence that begins by announcing that only 47 of the whatever-product will be sold (at this price, in this color, with this bonus, etc.) can, in its second piece, list the names of the first 18 buyers and show that only 29 remain, and in its third piece list the names of the 34 buyers and show that only 13 remain available.
The most powerful urgency by exclusivity is having only one available. Neiman-Marcus does this every year, in the pages of its big Christmas catalog, with unique gift items and experiences that there is only one of. For example, in one year’s Christmas book, they offered a backstage experience and actual walk-on part one night in the Broadway musical Annie, for just $30,000.00; a Woody Trailer reconfigured as an elaborate portable bar, as the ultimate tailgate party vehicle, for $150,000.00; a private dinner for a party of ten with a gaggle of great celebrity chefs, for $250,000.00; and a trip for two to Paris and Geneva, including a visit to the Van Cleef & Arpels boutique and watch-making shop, and unique his and her watches, for $1,090,000.00. Will someone buy each of these one-of-a-kind gifts? Based on historical precedent with NM’s annual one-of-a-kind gifts, that answer is almost certainly yes. But, really, anybody can create one-of-a-kind gifts and experiences, or very limited availability equivalents. NM also garners an enormous amount of media attention and free publicity each year because of these extraordinary gift offers—something a local business could do at a local level just as easily.
In B2B, in the advertising, consulting, and coaching fields, this is often done with geographic area exclusivity. A collection of licensed print ads and radio and TV commercials, a seat in a mastermind group, access to various resources becomes more desirable (and can be sold for a much higher price) when only one CPA in Pittsburgh can have it, thus the race is on and any delay may put it in the hands of your arch-competitor with you forever locked out than when it is available to any and all comers. A very successful program like this I helped a client, Burleson Seminars, develop is ExcellenceInOrthodontics.org. Only one orthodontist per geoarea gets the certification, use of the identity and logo, use of exclusive patient education books and videos, and holds a position in an online directory promoted to consumers by online and magazine advertising. They went from zero to a multimillion-dollar licensing business almost overnight.
Certain businesses have actual scarcity. The people I acquire rare and first edition books from for my collection, Bauman Rare Books in New York, have actual scarcity and therefore real urgency. If they have a single copy of a first edition of a book I want, signed by its author, I know they are simultaneously notifying multiple clients of its availability and even a minute’s hesitation may let someone beat me to the purchase—so I must decide quickly and impulsively; I have no time to consider cost. Most businesses lacking such actual scarcity can, with creative thought, manufacture it, offer by offer by offer.
So, how could an ordinary local restaurant and sports bar create an exclusive offer with enormous inherent urgency, publicity appeal to local media, and excitment to its customers? My prescription would be to rent a football celebrity, perhaps a local hero, and craft an afternoon and evening of activities around his presence. One offer, fairly standard: he’s there for a meet ‘n’ greet and photo opportunity during the Sunday afternoon games for any customer with autographed footballs and jerseys auctioned off during an hour within that time frame, with proceeds to a local charity—a limited number permitted in, pre-registration made possible, with or without ticket fee. Then, the exclusive offer: just 12 patrons can buy a ticket to go into the private dining room or roped-off section, have dinner with, watch the Sunday night game with, and hang out with the star, and get an autographed ball, jersey, and photo—at, say, $2,000.00 per ticket. With that, there’s massive urgency because there are only 12. A financial advisor, lawyer, auto dealer, etc., could use the same premise, renting the facility or joint-venturing with a restaurant owner, and still incorporating the local charity. The event itself would be directly profitable, reward good clients, and create new clients. The “halo effect” of the promotion to the business’ entire email, social media, and mailing lists is significant, while the opportunity for free—but valuable—publicity is profound. What’s most important to understand is that I took a business that is about “come on in” and eat, drink, and be merry, and converted it into a direct marketing business, with two different, specific offers, both with created and legitimate urgency.
My friend, top direct-response copywriter John Carlton, always advises imagining your prospective customer or client as a gigantic somnambulant sloth, spread out on the couch, loathe to move his sleeping bulk, phone just out of reach. Your offer must force and compel him to move now. Your goal is immediate response. A plain vanilla, dull, mundane offer won’t do it.