Last time we talked about when you have multiple contacts with your prospect or client base your success rate goes up exponentially. You will get a higher response than just the number of contacts would explain. If you send out one piece and get a 1% response and then continue to contact them say 6 times, your response rate will not go up to 6%, but instead be closer to 12% to 21%.
It will go up far higher than simply adding the number of exposures together. A way to leverage multiple exposures even more is to use multiple media e.g. newspaper, seminars, radio, billboards, etc. The closer together you can coordinate these different types of media, the more effective it will be. It creates a, “These guys are everywhere. They must be something big.” You have to keep in mind that not all the media will have the same response rate but instead builds the response rate as part of the total package. Your radio show or commercial may have little or no response rate but it will cause your seminar or direct mail response rate to go up. People will say, “Hey, I know these guys! I just heard them on the radio yesterday.” When this happens, they will be much more responsive to your direct mail offer.
Obviously, you do not have an infinite amount of money to spend on advertising in all sorts of media but there are some inexpensive ways you can use this concept of helping consumers remember who you are and thus increasing the response to all your marketing. These include:
- Make sure all your marketing has the same look; colors, logo, layout etc. Many advisors of making the mistake of wanting to “keep it fresh,” by constantly changing the look of what they do. Look at what happened to Coke when they introduced New Coke.
- If you can come up with an easy to remember slogan or tag line that you can use it really helps with word of mouth advertising.
- Target market—you are much better being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Choose a group of people and hit them continually with your message instead of sending to the masses.
- Consider hitting them with house flyers that are hand delivered by having a high school kid attach them to their doors.
- Sponsor a local event—golf tournaments are always looking for hole sponsors or your town probably has some sort of holiday events that are looking for sponsorship. These not only are good for the community you live in, they are excellent ways to build image and name recognition.
- Creating a total marketing plan around these items anchored by a handwritten note campaign will have you bringing in as many clients as you want within 12 months.
Soon we will be talking some more about direct mail and how it should look to give you the highest response. We’ll look at a couple of case studies that have been done to find the most effective layouts you can use on your direct mail.
