Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

A well-constructed sales letter is considered salesmanship in print, allowing a business owner to make their sales presentation to hundreds or thousands of people at once without ever leaving their office.

In today’s high tech world of e-mail marketing and internet strategies, direct mail sometimes takes a back seat to other marketing strategies.  But, when done properly, direct mail is still one of the most powerful marketing tactics on the planet for the small business owner.

To increase the effectiveness of any direct mail campaign and to get the most “bang” for your marketing dollar, the ad must follow certain rules.

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Unlike nearly all other forms of marketing, direct marketing allows you the unique opportunity to test the success of not just the complete marketing effort, but discrete pieces of the marketing program individually. This is called split testing.

A split test is a head-to-head test between two different versions (or variables) of a specific element of a direct marketing program. For example, when split testing a direct mail piece, you would send out two versions of the same sales letter.

Both letters are almost identical, except that one includes a bold headline that asks the customer to order. Both include different website URLs to visit to place an order. Each of the website order pages look and act exactly the same. The purpose is to record which sales letter the customer responded to. This type of split test would allow you to discover which of the two sales letters was most effective, the one with the headline or the one without.

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People don’t want to be sold – if they don’t know, like or trust you they can block your messages in a staggering amount of ways.

So, what’s a small business that wants to target a very defined group of prospects to do? I mean, direct mail is still a viable tool for this kind of engagement, isn’t it?

I believe direct mail is a very powerful medium for targeting prospects, but the rules of engagement, just like about everything in marketing have changed.

If you want your mail offers to get noticed they must be more personal than you could ever have imagined something falling in the junk mail category could be.

Think one to one personal.

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I wonder if you made the same assumption as I did when you read the title of this post?  Did you read “Direct Marketing” but think “Direct Mail?”

Direct marketing is defined as sending a marketing message directly to someone, instead of using mass media such as TV, magazines, billboards, etc.  Direct marketing channels include but aren’t limited to paper mail, telephone, mobile phone text (SMS), and e-mail.

This is an important distinction because the cost of a first class postage stamp in the U.S. is going up to 44 cents on May 11, 2009.  Each postage increase makes getting return on your investment in traditional direct mail a lot harder to come by.

Despite the price increase, direct marketing is still worthwhile.  It just means you have to be smarter at it. 

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No matter what you want to call it — direct mail, junk mail, circulars, ads, or spam — they all share the same purpose: to motivate you to buy from them. While a lot of what is out there may actually be junk, a savvy direct marketer inspires the recipient to read their ad.

Unlike your brand, which will tell the customer what to think, your marketing strategy must tell them what to do. Before you can effectively do that, you need to know how.

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