Unless you’re sending out content that is personal, such as bills, then you want people to know you exist and standing out from the crowd is one of the ways this is done.
Say Hello to Everyone You Meet
Joe Girard is in the Guinness Book of records for selling the most cars in one year at 1425.
Between 1963 and 1978 he sold a staggering, 13001 cars for one dealership, which averages at 867 cars per year or sales of 2.37 cars per day every day for 15 years.
There are a lot of things which he did to help make this happen and one of the key things was to get noticed. One story which sticks out was the number of business cards he could push out in a month – 16,000 and no that’s not an error. One of the ways he did this was to go to a game, football or baseball and when a score was made, and everyone cheered he would jump up with everyone else to cheer and spray business cards into the crowd.
Get Noticed Even if You Don’t Meet in Person
He understood that the more people he reached the more he sold – it was then and still is today, ‘a numbers game’. If you have the best product in the world and no one knows, you don’t make sales.
He had a complete system, which meant looking after existing customers as well as finding new ones, so he had a full sales pipeline at all times.
Print and Todays Sales Pipeline
In his day there was no internet, so there were fewer channels to occupy. Today, although there are more channels, the same principles still apply. Overall, still just under 50% of ad spend goes into offline advertising of which print is a part.
It’s important to understand that digital and offline advertising should be combined, or should I say work together. For instance, a direct mail piece can move someone from offline to online and generate sales or enquiries, forming part of your sales funnel.
Print Gets You Noticed
An envelope can be like a miniature billboard, telling everyone who sees it that you exist, which is why personalised envelopes can help brand awareness or can be used to encourage people to open and read what’s inside.
Today, getting noticed and more importantly, remembered, is harder then ever before. Every opportunity needs to be taken to ensure brand awareness and promotion are being pushed at every opportunity.
How Many Blank Spaces Do You have?
Take a look at every piece of print that you send out and look at the blank areas and ask, “could I add some branding or promotional information without a negative impact?”.
Sometimes we run into “we’ve always done it that way or it’s been that way for ages and it seems to work” but has anyone looked at the analytics to prove it still works and if it does, don’t change it, but if results are dropping, maybe it’s time to take a look.
Not Sure Split Test
No one has all the answers and best guesses are often bad guesses, so stop guessing and start collecting numbers that prove which way is optimum.
Start by creating two versions and split your audience and send half to each. Make sure you can effectively track the results and make sure the demographics are the same.
Simple tracking – create two pages on the website that are ‘hidden’ and drive the two audiences to the two pages and see which page gets the most traffic and best results.
Money in the Bank from Print
The bottom line is, ultimately the only line that matters – it makes money, or it doesn’t. Print helps with touch points and being physical it has more impact than its digital counterpart that can be lucky to get fractions of a second attention.
Number of Times Seen Relates to Sales
Combined with other marketing, printed matter works well, and the printed envelope is all part of that brand awareness and promotion that we all need to be doing, where we increase the number of times we are seen or engaged with.
Despite what people say and despite what we say ourselves, the reality is multiple touch points are needed and today that number is increasing as the amount of information we are bombarded with increases.
So, a good place to start is by taking a look at where you can increase your touch points for minimal outlay, by adding a logo to items such as envelopes.
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