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.

Create A Reaction

If you receive a letter that tells you that you’ve just won something, wouldn’t that motivate you to open it?

Opening the letter is a reaction. By announcing that you might have won something, they have guided that reaction into something that would benefit them. The moment that letter has been opened, they will continue to try and persuade you into doing what they want you to do. That is exactly what you need to do with your own direct marketing materials.

Use Action Words And Phrases

You’ve won a million dollars!!!*

That got your attention, right? It is an example of an action phrase. By telling you that you’ve won some money, your interest has been peaked. The more interested you are, the more likely you are to read on.

You’ll need to prompt your customer to buy what you are trying to sell. If you want to do that, you will need to know the right words to attract their interest. Will they save money if they buy from you? Are you offering them something for free if they choose to patronize your business?

Do not overdo it. Creating action means nothing if it is suffocated by too much information. Tell them what you want to share and offer them a reason to contact you if they would like to learn more.

Do Not Lie

*if we choose you.

Remember that promise for a million dollars? When you open the letter and find that you are only in the running, how do you feel?

Although they didn’t lie, it will still evoke disappointment in the recipient. The next time a letter comes saying you’ve won the elusive million, you’ll be less likely to believe them. After a while that letter might just go straight from mailbox to garbage.

Don’t leave your customer disappointed. If you are going to offer a promise, you need to go through with it. If you promise to give them a free gift when they purchase your product, give it to them. When you lie and disappoint your customer you will only reduce the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Guarantee Your Product

Everything from infomercials to the local store can offer some sort of guarantee to their customer. Whether is it a money back guarantee or an exchange if the product purchased is less than par. These guarantees make the customer feel secure about what they are buying.

If your customer can feel secure in buying what you have to offer, they’re more likely to spend the money for it. Furthermore, your guarantee shows them that you care.

One of the classic mistakes many marketers make is to assume that potential customers inherently care about their company or the product they have to sell. It may sound harsh, but the fact of the matter is that they just don’t. Most customers don’t care about you, your product, your exciting young company or what you have to say.

What do they care about? Solving some problem or meeting some need of their own. But increasingly, they also care about doing business with companies that care about them.

With the economy in ruins and large corporations mostly to blame, consumers are plain-out disgusted with corporate greed. They want companies that give something back, that help them out a little in their times of need, and that give them some flexibility.

In other words, it’s payback time, and what our sister site trendwatching.com calls Generation G is calling on companies large and small to shell out.

Fortunately–as is so often the case–opportunity tends to come hand-in-hand with a new challenge. Corporate generosity is now beginning to be expected, so this is your chance to shine by being one of the first to deliver. Direct marketing is an ideal way to do that.

1. Give generously. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Whether it’s a customized PDF travel guide or ice cream on a hot day, potential customers are unlikely to say ‘no’ to something free, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot. It also makes your direct marketing effort more than just another easily tossed piece of junk mail–one that can create some warm and fuzzy brand impressions instead.

2. Samples with a twist. Going a step further, you can serve two purposes by making the ‘free stuff’ samples of your own products, or at least some aspect of them. Recession-wary consumers are increasingly reluctant to buy something new without trying it out first, so if you can, let your direct marketing be what makes that ‘tryvertising’ possible. Two examples:

• First Flavor lets manufacturers convert flavors into Peel’n Taste strips that can easily be distributed in a direct marketing campaign. Resembling the breath strips already on the market, First Flavor’s Peel’n Taste strips made their debut back in 2007 in a rum mojito flavor designed to advertise a TV show. The FDA-approved strips contain no sugar or calories.
• London-based Matter has created a new twist on traditional direct marketing by sending out boxes of ‘interesting stuff’ for free to specific audiences. Participating companies create and contribute something that explains what they do, indicates something about their values or can be tried out. Matter then sends the boxes so that they arrive on a Saturday—when targeted consumers are more likely to spend some time with them.

3. Love the Earth. When today’s consumers look for companies that care, that includes caring about the environment. I already offered some suggestions on this in my earlier post, “Do the Green Thing,” and they apply to direct marketing just as well. Generosity is no longer an option, and that includes eco-generosity!

One final note: If you think generosity is something that need only be shown during prosperous times, think again. Much of this depends more on creativity and the right partnerships than it does on shelling out lots of cash; it also stands to make a *much* bigger impression than yet another, bland sales pitch. Be generous and thrive–or, remain stingy and… well, get left in the dust.

If you click on the “Direct Marketing Strategies” tab, you’ll see a ton of great advice on how to boost your revenues through direct marketing.  Here’s an Editor’s Roundup of some of the hottest direct marketing tips from our group of small business marketing experts.

CRAFT A MESSAGE: Joe Costantino offers six rules for creating an effective direct marketing message.

Before you can embark on your direct marketing journey, you have to figure out what message you want to send and what action you want prospects to take. It’s important to remember that people won’t know why they should buy from you unless you tell them.

GET RESPONSE: Anita Campbell outlines four ways to get a high response from your direct marketing efforts.

One of the great direct marketing tips Anita offers is important and often-ignored: “Identify your audience and reach them where and how they want to be reached.” Don’t send a blast to a huge list — through snail mail or online — and then just hope for the best. Determine who you want to reach and do research on the best way to reach them.

MEASURE THAT RESPONSE: Dane Carlson details how to test the effectiveness of your direct marketing through split  testing.

How will you know which methods work and which ones don’t if you don’t actually track your results? Often times minor changes can make all the difference in your direct marketing. Online and offline, there are many ways to track where your customers are coming from.

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The Small Business Marketing Guide, brought to you by HP, features a plethora of advice and resources to help you grow your small business. Check out a special offer from HP good for $100 worth of free postage and supplies from Stamps.com.  And be sure to read expert posts about brand strategy, direct marketing, creating marketing materials, taking your brand online.

Even during the best of times, it’s far more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. But during a recession? The disparity can become monumental as cash-strapped potential buyers hold their wallets close in their efforts to save money.

Each lost customer, meanwhile, is a step closer to disaster for small businesses. So it’s more important than ever to do everything you can to hang onto the customers who have already chosen to buy from you before. It’s time to count your blessings, in other words, and do what you can to keep them. And that, in turn, is where direct marketing can help.

‘Thank You,’ Three Ways

Postage costs may be increasing, but there are still some pieces of mail that can and should be sent out to help keep your best customers close by your side. Dispense with the hard-driving sales pitch for a while and show some gratitude instead.

1. Say ‘Thank you.’ It’s a rare company these days that bothers to send out thank-you letters, and that alone is reason enough to send one–it will almost certainly set you apart. I don’t mean the easy, preprinted postcard, either; I mean the real letter with the real signature that thanks the customer, genuinely, for their business, without trying to make a sale. A single, simple thank-you letter like that can go a long way toward showing appreciation and respect for your customer and deepen your relationship with them further.

2. Commit random acts of kindness. Your best customers will be delighted–and spread the word accordingly–when you surprise them with the occasional gift. For example, when customers of Turkish Akbank use its Wings credit card to pay for meals at participating restaurants, every once in a while they get notified that Wings is picking up the tab. Imagine a surprise gift in the mail instead of yet another sales spiel! They needn’t be expensive, but for maximum effect they should be unexpected.

3. Espouse ‘perkonomics.’ Taking the notion even further, installing a program whereby loyal customers get rewarded regularly makes good sense. This is part of what we at Springwise refer to as ‘perkonomics,’ and it’s popping up all over. More than just loyalty schemes or discounts, perkonomics is about creating novel, memorable perks for your customers: sneak previews of new products, for example, or passes that help your best customers skip a queue. Start sharing perks through the mail, and you can bet it won’t be long before customers are watching for your communications!

In short, it’s hard to imagine a more targeted and profitable list to send to than that of your already-loyal customers. In these turbulent times, if it’s a choice between cementing relationships with current customers or trying to win new ones, the decision is a no-brainer: Keep the ones you’ve got coming back for more.

Gut reaction to Direct Marketing ~ makes me think of the things that appear in my physical mailbox and my digital one. In trying to figure out what to tell you this week, i noticed something when i went to grab a glass of orange juice from the fridge… the BEST random mailers i get seem to end up on my fridge. In from the mailbox, played with a bit at the table, and then either trashed/recycled or there they go ~ magnet grasped onto the fridge like works of art (keep in mind i’m 26 and kidless, so the fridge is more filled with tetris magnets and random snippets that inspire me versus fingerpainting masterpieces).

So as a recipient of direct marketing, i implore you to make whatever it is you stick in one of my many mailboxes (be it digital or physical) – MEMORABLE! And if possible beautiful, informative, surprising, and fun as well. Like that postcard from Veer? I couldn’t stop fiddling with it during phone calls, feeling the depressed words, cooing over the fonts (i’m silly like that)… Veer always makes the best mailers. If you want to get random snail mail that will put a smile on your face, get on their mailing list! New stock photo collection and new fonts? Massive posters show up that i can’t bare to throw away. A series of fonts and clip art that lean retro ~ you’ll be trying to fill out the puzzles in their secret society handbook. Summertime blues ~ but fun refreshing fonts and color palettes to be shown? Your desk will suddenly have a fun flippy calendar looking booklet that really houses instant excuses for all occasions in beautiful typography. Keep in mind what Veer actually sells is fonts and stock photography ~ but that’s no excuse not to get creative with what you may send out! Really i think there’s something magical about being able to not only spread the word about your goods and services, have it be informative, and perhaps most importantly of all, make whatever you put out there feel like a GIFT to the recipients.

And know if you sent me something in mail and are curious if it worked on me… well just come and see if it made the fridge…

Late last year, Dell reported that the sales alerts they posted on Twitter directly resulted in $1 million in sales, but a WebTrends survey indicates that marketers are still somewhat reluctant of the microblogging site, with only 2% of respondents saying that they use Twitter sometimes or often.

Benefits: Twitter is free. Setting up a profile takes mere minutes, and it provides immediate access to the key players and active participants within your industry. You’ll be able to use your followers as a sounding board for your ideas, and quickly identify opportunities for your brand based on key topics discussed frequently on Twitter. While it’s apparent that Twitter enables you to share links and online promotions, you can also arrange face-to-face meetings (Tweetups) or promote offline campaigns. You’ll find that Twitter users as a whole are far more receptive to these 140-character mini-messages than they are to e-mails or phone calls.

Celebrities already know how to use Twitter as a viral PR tool. Hugh Jackman recently pledged via Twitter to donate $100,000 to a non-profit organization, encouraging his 40,000 followers to convince him which charity to choose in 140 characters or less. And Ashton Kutcher is currently embroiled in a bitter race with CNN to 1 million followers, promising to donate 10,000 mosquito bed nests to charity in honor of World Malaria Day if he’s successful in doing so. In bypassing the paparazzi and targeting their fans directly, Jackman and Kutcher have advanced their respective charity causes while earning crucial virtual street cred.

Challenges: Twitter is not a blind dumping ground for your promotions. To be heard as a newcomer, you’ll have to interact with the community at large, cultivating a group of followers that are within your target market. This takes time, and some marketers are far more interested in promoting their brand than enriching their industry or networking with others.

You wait and wait and nothing happens — no responses, no interest and no sales.

This can be quite typical with direct marketing campaigns and could be because you fell into 3 common traps that should be avoided.

Trap 1 – One Size Fits All

This trap often occurs when you use a large list of potential customers without taking the time to research which potential customers will actually have a need or desire for your product/service and the offer you are promoting. You can pick these campaigns pretty easily as they usually have a generic message and quickly start talking about their company’s products or services.

To avoid this common mistake make sure you have a good understanding of your key target market, their interests, attitudes and buying behavior. By doing this you can tailor your campaign to meet their needs, arouse their interest, engage them and lead them to actually to take up the offer. By understanding your customers you are also in a position to select the type of direct marketing that will be the most appropriate, for example printed mail or email.

Trap 2 – No Call To Action

Have you ever received a letter with just a brochure enclosed and nothing to indicate what you should do with it? Or you may have seen a direct marketing campaign that has an offer hidden in the copy without clear specifics and the details such as timing or conditions hidden or listed in 6-point type at the bottom.

A direct marketing campaign needs to have a very clear call to action. It does not have to be in the biggest font, all in caps or highlighted.  It just needs to be clearly noticeable and simple to understand. Having a clear call to action that is enticing to customers, will build and strengthen the relationship and help you achieve a return on your investment.

Trap 3 – Not Tracking a Campaign’s Results

You can clearly see this trap if you ask someone about the results of their campaign and you receive an answer of “quite good I think”. Not tracking direct marketing campaign results is often accompanied by not setting objectives nor having a customer database in place.

As with every marketing tactic you need to set objectives up front as to what you want to achieve with your customers as well as be able to calculate the return on your investment. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have a customer database so you can clearly track who has taken up the offers and the results achieved. By tracking your campaign results you are able to see what worked and what did not work so that you can refine your future campaigns and offers to achieve better results.

Direct marketing campaigns can be very effective for small businesses.  If you are thinking about conducting a campaign, start by keeping it simple so you do not fall into one of these three traps.

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Susan Oakes is a director and cofounder of Marketing for Business Success Pty Ltd., which developed M4B Marketing Software.  She blogs at M4B Marketing Blog.

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. Think of ways to create the smallest, tightest group of prospects and shower them with fully engaged attention, rather than a bulk list of suspects.

The good news is that technology can come to your aid in this quest. Drawing your prospects into a game of trust building with personal URLs or coded landing pages that alert you when a prospect has picked up the free report online can make your direct mail much more integrated into your online education machine.

On demand printing, even in-house on demand printing, that adds personal touches to your mail through database integration has evolved far beyond Dear [your name here] personalization. Adding individual photos and personalized headlines can enhance even the simplest of postcard mailings.

Another tried and true direct marketing strategy is something I like to call lumpy mail. Creating themed package mailings with trinkets or gadgets that reinforce your message is a great way to get your mail to stand out and get the message delivered.

I once sent a load of postcards that I paid my daughters to add a strip of duct tape to – response rates were through the roof.

Don’t look at your direct mail so much as a way to sell something, focus on building trust and engagement into to deeper levels of content. Your call to action should likely be a small move to the next step and then the next and the next. Move prospects along logically with a full set of lead nurturing online and offline touches that make them conclude on their own terms that you are THE obvious choice to meet their needs.

Today’s direct marketing efforts are more like candles lighting the way so that your prospects can find you rather than you going out and hunting them.

Photo credit: Oran Viriyincy

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.

Rule #1 – Only Use 2-Step Direct Response Advertising

Most direct mail ads that clog your mailbox are those “buy now or else we have nothing else to offer you” ads that do very little to educate a customer about what makes a company different or why they should even buy from you in the first place.

So exactly, what is 2-step direct response advertising?

Direct-response advertising is an ad intent on generating a very specific response from the reader.  The two-step approach provides the reader with the ability to take a “baby step’ to find out more information about your company, before you try to sell them.  The goal of the ad is to “warm your prospect up” with educational material, not to make the sale.

Some of the things you can offer your prospects in your two-step ads include: free reports, free samples and free seminars.  This type of ad will almost always generate a higher response from potential customers because the purpose of the ad is to educate your prospect on what makes your company different from your competitors and to get them to take a low-risk next step.

Rule #2 – All ads should have a single purpose

The KISS method applies here . . .  keep it simple Sam.  Your ads should focus on the one thing you want your prospect to know or do and then keep asking them to do this throughout the ad.

Rule #3 – All ads should have a powerful headline

Your ads must get read in order for you to have any chance at getting your prospect to take the desired action.  You get attention for your ad with a benefit-promising headline that entices the reader to keep reading.  Notice how I said benefit-promising headline and not feature-promising headline.  People don’t buy features; they buy great results or benefits.  For example, you’re not buying leather seats for your car; you’re buying comfort, beauty, and prestige.  Great headlines will get your direct mail ads read.

Rule #4 – All ads should clearly state the benefit(s) the reader will get by taking the requested action

Clearly state the most important benefit your reader will receive by taking action.

For example,

If I can show you how you can double your income by giving me just 30 minutes of your time a month, would you like to learn more?

Rule #5 – All ads should provide proof that you will deliver as promised

Testimonial quotes from satisfied clients are an excellent way for you to prove that you have delivered the results you claim for others.  The testimonial should specifically state how your product or service solved the problem or changed the life of your satisfied customers.

Rule #6 – All ads should make an offer with a specific call to action

Always give your readers a specific reason to act with an offer of a free report, free seminar, etc.  Make it easy for your prospects to respond to your ad.  Lead your prospects with a couple of ways to respond to your offer by providing a telephone number, an e-mail address or a web address.

Business owners that follow these six rules combined with multiple touches to their prospects and customers greatly increase their odds for direct mail success.

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Joe Costantino is an Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach who specializes in teaching business owners how to implement a step-by-step marketing system for their businesses..

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.

Once you have settled on the best sales letter, you could also split test other parts of same marketing program. You could send everyone the same sales letter, but in one letter ask that they call a telephone number to order, while in the other direct them to a website for ordering. You could also send everyone the same letter, but send some of them in red envelopes and others in white envelopes, or offer free shipping on some and not on others, or offer the product for $9.95 in one letter and $19.95 in another.

Common variables to test include:

• The written content of the letter
• The layout of the letter
• Headlines
• Calls to action (”Order Today!” or “Don’t Delay!”)
• Graphic elements
• Prices
• Different ways of selling the product (”buy one get one free” or “three for the price of two”)
• Shipping costs (free shipping or flat-rate shipping)
• Shipping methods (UPS or postal mail)
• Ways to order (web, telephone or postal mail)
• Different ways to pay (credit card or bill me later)

The larger the sample size, the more accurate the results. So if you only send out 10 test letters, your ability to predict the response to a million direct mail pieces is limited. Be sure test a large enough subset of your total list.

To make your tests even more accurate you should: randomly select your recipients, because new members of your list might respond differently from old members, and do your tests at the same time, because marketing received at the end of the month might have a different impact from something received in the middle of the month.

When split testing, not only is it very important to only test one variable at a time, it is equally important to have a method for accurately determining which version of the marketing program the customer responded to. For each version you need a separate response mechanism. These can be unique URLs, coupon codes, separate telephone numbers, or different post office boxes. As long as you’re able to accurately determine which version the customer is responding to, your split test will be a success.

When you have the results from your split test, carefully track and record as much data as possible. Be sure to to include the number of responses, the number of new customers, the average size of each order, and the average amount spent per order. It is important to track all of this data because you will sometimes be surprised when you compare the results. For instance, one test might result in fewer responses than the another, but with a much higher amount spent per order. Depending on your circumstances, this might be a very good thing. From your split tests, you can also determine which variables result in the lowest customer acquisition costs, which when doing a big expensive mailing could make or break you.

Split testing isn’t just for direct mail, either. You can split test other types of direct marketing including email, text messages and telemarketing calls. The opportunity for split testing in direct marketing is enormous, and very simple, as long as you remember to never change more than one variable during any one specific test.