How I Started Making Money in Direct Mail—and How You Can, Too!

AS A BUSINESS OWNER, ONE OF YOUR PRIMARY GOALS IS TO SEE your business grow and become more profitable. In my experience, direct mail is one of the most powerful tools available to help you achieve that.

Regardless of what business you are in, or how big it is, or even what type of customers you have . . . with the right information, I believe you will be able to develop a direct-mail program that will work for your business.

Marketing is a critical need of every business. It doesn’t matter if you are selling software, clothing, or books, or if you manufacture some kind of widget.

Maybe you produce the best face cream in the world. Perhaps it even has the power to rejuvenate the skin and make people look 20 years younger!

You still could end up not making a dime.

That’s because unless somebody buys your face cream, you have no income stream. The product is just the beginning of the process. You have to have customers, too.

There’s one main way to grow any business, and that’s to grow and expand your customer base. It’s all about finding new customers and making additional sales to the ones you already have.

You have to find some way to get the word out about your business so that it reaches the widest possible group of potential buyers and convinces them to give you a try.

What are some of your options?

You could hang a sign out in front of your business. That could lure people in, but you would be reaching only the people who happen to be walking down the street and passing by the sign.

You could put an ad in a newspaper, but then you’re reaching only people who read that paper, who happen to notice your ad as they turn to the sports section.

You could hire a blimp to carry your message across the sky on a streamer. That could potentially reach the whole city—but only the people who are looking up when the blimp goes by.

But what if you could get your message directly into the hands of large numbers of people—people who are highly qualified to become your customers because they have spent money on products like yours in the past and are likely to spend more in the future?

Even better, what if you could put your message in an attractive package that gets their attention and holds it while you explain all the reasons why your product or service is better than any your competitors can provide?

And what if you could tell them about a special offer that’s available for a limited time so that they feel compelled to respond to it immediately?

In a way, it would be as if you were having a private conversation with a thousand, ten thousand, maybe even a million “hot prospects,” explaining to them your product, touting its advantages, and presenting your unbeatable offer.

Oh, and one more thing . . . you could have that “private conversation” with people all over the country at the same time.

In essence, that’s what direct-mail marketing is all about—reaching out to large numbers of individuals or companies with a targeted, carefully crafted message that you put right in their hands.

And it works! Direct mail has been proven to be an extremely effective way to build and maintain just about any kind of business. In fact, many multimillion-dollar businesses have started with little more than an idea and a sales piece.

Now you too can begin to take advantage of this premier approach to advertising to build your own business. You just have to learn the proven techniques that can make your cash register ring. And I’ve outlined them for you here in the pages of this book.

My Life in Direct-Mail Marketing

I’ve spent my entire adult life in the direct-mail field. Over the years I’ve strategized and executed thousands of direct-mail campaigns. I’ve seen companies make hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of meticulously planned mailings.

And the techniques that worked for them can do wonders for you. Whether you want to mail only 500 pieces or you’re ready to run a nationwide campaign of 100,000,000 pieces—I’ve done it all. And this book will teach you all the secrets of direct-mail success I’ve gathered over the years.

But let me start at the beginning. My first experience with direct mail came when I was just 19 years old. I was a young entrepreneur with big dreams, manufacturing rock-climbing holds (the fake rocks you bolt onto a wall to practice rock climbing). My “manufacturing facility” was a small workshop in my parents’ garage.

I was selling hundreds of these fake rocks through my friends, but I had big dreams. I wanted to get them into retail shops.

So I bought a list of 100 stores that I thought were good prospects to carry my rocks. Then I wrote a one-page sales letter and stuffed it into an envelope with one of my brochures. After licking the stamps and dropping the mail off at the post office, I sat back, waiting for the phone to start ringing off the hook.

So how did my first campaign do?

It completely bombed—not a single phone call! How could things have gone so wrong? Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed.

And so my first experience with direct mail was similar to that of so many others: an unsuccessful campaign. For a while I even believed as many others do: that direct mail just doesn’t work.

Now that I’ve sent out hundreds of millions of sales letters and generated countless leads and customers, I can look back on my first campaign and laugh. Knowing what I do now, it’s obvious to me that I did everything wrong.

First, I got the list of names I mailed to from an unreliable source. So I could have sent my sales piece to people with no interest in rock climbing. Or the names could have been so old that the addresses were no good any more. Second, knowing nothing about writing sales copy, I prepared a very short letter, deluding myself into thinking I could convince people to buy $150 worth of rocks in just two paragraphs. And those two paragraphs were just bad, focusing on the features of my rocks, not on their benefits. (I’ll explain more about that in Chapter 2.)

Fortunately, that wasn’t the end of the story for me. I didn’t give up on my direct-mail campaigns for my rock-climbing-hold business. I kept testing different methods until I found a few that worked. And as a result, I ended up selling over 4,000 fake rocks!

Now, you may be familiar with the saying, “Be careful what you wish for.” Success doesn’t always turn out to be what we expect, and after a few years of working in my own sweatshop, I decided that manufacturing rocks was not the business I wanted to be in after all.

So I got a job working for a large financial publishing company that had been built upon a highly creative and successful marketing program.

This was my opportunity to learn a lot more about direct-mail marketing and see firsthand how a company could use it correctly to gross over $100 million.

I’ve been immersed in direct-mail marketing for over 15 years now and have worked with a huge variety of clients in many different business niches. I’ve sold everything from courses on the benefits of drinking eight glasses of water a day and how to train your bird to do tricks, to technical software, real estate investments, financial investments, continuing-education courses, health products, diet programs, medical professionals, and even wholesale clothing. Just about anything you can think of can be profitably sold through the mail.

I made some mistakes along the way—especially at the beginning. But I learned from all of them, and soon I was helping companies grow from small start-ups to multimillion-dollar businesses through the direct-mail campaigns I ran for them.

I’ve created this in-depth guide to help save you from making the same mistakes that I made and to show you the techniques I use every day to generate millions of paying customers and countless qualified prospects for my clients.

Direct-mail marketing works for just about any business area. Whether you are a small-business owner, an information marketer, a software developer, or a small retail business owner . . . whether you have an auto-mechanic shop, own an insurance business, run a beauty salon, or even if you just know you want to get into business but you don’t know what it is yet . . . whatever it is that you do or want to do, learning the strategies of direct mail will help you be more effective and profitable with your marketing efforts. I’m going to show you how direct mail can be used for any market . . . in any business . . . and in any economy.

To get started, I want to give you a few examples of market niches in which I’ve seen direct mail work extremely well.

The first is the publishing business. Over the years I have worked for a number of different publishers. The largest was a financial publisher that sold over 700,000 financial educational courses for $195 each (do the math on that one!).

The largest mailing I ever sent was for this publisher—tipping the scales at just over 5.7 million pieces! A paper mill in the state of Washington had to ship 36 boxcars of paper down to Los Angeles where my commercial printer was located . . . just for this one mailing.

In addition to his flagship product, this publisher sold a variety of books, courses, and newsletters. There were years where this business generated over $100 million in sales—and 95 percent of the revenue was initiated through direct-mail campaigns.

I’ve used this same type of direct-mail marketing to sell information for a real estate information marketer. If you have never explored information marketing or the amount of money you can make with it, you should! A real estate client of mine made over $100 million in one year, and then did it over again in multiple years.

I used the exact same direct-mail marketing methods that I used to sell millions of financial courses and information on real estate to promote a clothing wholesaler. The mailings worked so well for this business that I was mailing out over 50,000 pieces every other week! All based around selling clothing!

I’ve worked with clients in just about every niche you can imagine, and most of them developed highly successful and very profitable companies that make millions each year, all through the right use of direct-mail marketing.

You May Have Heard . . .

There’s a lot of talk you may have heard that the United States Postal Service is in trouble and snail mail is a thing of the past. I’d like to address this issue before we go any further.

Yes, the USPS has some big issues and problems to deal with, but they are not going anywhere. They are here to stay!

The fact is, direct mail is alive and booming, even in today’s economic downtrend. The Postal Service is seeing a 5.8 percent increase in the amount of money being spent on direct mail. A whopping $47.8 billion was spent on direct-mail advertising in 2011. The numbers were predicted to be larger than that in 2012. Studies indicate that consumers received 5 billion pieces of direct mail in 2011, compared to 3.6 billion in 2010. The 2012 numbers were expected to show another large increase!

SourceLink, a top marketing agency, reported in 2012 that nine out of ten of their clients named direct mail the medium that was best equipped to help them reach their marketing objectives. In March 2013, Target Marketing’s Seventh Annual Media Usage Forecast survey of B2C U.S. marketers reported that the marketing channel that delivers the best ROI for customer acquisition and retention is direct mail.

And these findings work across generations. With all the talk of using email or social networking for marketing, a national survey by ICOM found that in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic, direct mail was the preferred way to learn about marketing offers.

And people love receiving mail. Epsilon surveyed nearly 5,000 customers and found that “U.S. consumers report an emotional boost from receiving direct mail, with 60 percent agreeing they ‘enjoy checking the mail box for postal mail.’” People have a great connection with mail. It’s personal, tangible, and, if done right, can be highly targeted to individuals’ specific interests. The Epsilon survey also revealed that people reported that information received through postal mail was “more trustworthy” than information received through other channels.

And even neuroscience backs up these findings. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI) scanning to study brain response, researchers at Bangor University in Wales found that “greater emotional processing is facilitated by the physical material than by the virtual. The ‘real’ experience that the physical media provides means it’s better at becoming part of memory. It generates more emotion, which should help to develop more positive brand associations. The real experience is also internalized, which means the materials have a more personal effect, and therefore should aid motivation.”

The bottom line is that this type of advertising really works. Small businesses and entrepreneurs make millions each year from direct mail. Even online businesses use direct mail to drive buyers to their sites, including Google, which uses direct mail to get companies to sign up for their AdWords program. And direct mail can work for your business, too.

Now It’s Your Turn

I don’t care if your business is small or large. If you take what I’m about to reveal to you in this book and use it, I fully believe that you’ll see similar results in your own business. Most won’t make $100 million in a year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you increase your business tenfold.

The same strategies work whether you own an auto repair business, have a kitchen supply store, run a publishing company, or sell face cream. It doesn’t matter what type of business you are in. Direct-mail marketing can make your business grow!

The following chapters are going to show you—step by step—how to build your business with direct mail. These are the same techniques I’ve been using successfully for 15 years. You’ll learn how to easily acquire new customers and grow your business. And you’ll learn how to communicate with your existing customers and get them to give you more repeat business. I’ve also created a special website for you that includes sample sales pieces, direct-mail reporting examples, gifts, and access to some great resources. You can access it at www.TheDirectMailSolution.com.

Before we proceed, I think it’s important to take a moment to introduce marketing guru Dan S. Kennedy, my mentor, friend, and this book’s co-author. Dan is a best-selling author, speaker, direct-response marketing consultant, and copywriter who has been creating winning direct-mail campaigns for more than 30 years. His insight and advice makes an invaluable contribution to this book.

And now, on to The Direct-Mail Solution. Growing your client base and getting repeat business from your existing customers—this is how direct-mail marketing can turn any business into a gold mine.

—Craig Simpson