Retaining your current customers is a challenging and daunting task for sure. It is much harder to gain new customers, even more so in a sluggish economy such as ours.
What if you could have new prospects contact you?
Direct Mail if often thought of as “Old School”, with email marketing, social networking and all the other online marketing methods many are missing out on a low cost and effective way to generate new customers. While online marketing has its place, creating a bounce-back greeting card or post card offering a free gift is very powerful. Statics have shown that using a free gift in conjunction with a direct mail piece has on average a 10% return.
I have used this technique several times to generate new customers and increase tradeshow traffic to the various expo’s that I have exhibited at over the years. I am currently in the planning stages of launching a campaign the second week of January 2009.
You can handle the distribution of the bounce-back mailing two ways –
- 1. Simply acquire a list of companies that you would like to have as new customers and mail out your offer, leaving the “attention to” line empty.
- 2. A more effective way is to contact each company and get the name of the appropriate contact person, then send the direct mail piece to their attention. While this is a time consuming task your results will excide your expectations.
Another key is to offer an item that gets the attention of each of your recipients, while a Duffle Bag may be appropriate and appealing to some, a nice Digital Clock may hit the home run for others on your list. Making them take action and contact you for the freebie may take one or two mailings, offering a different item each time.
To You Success!
Tim Somers
Bizarre Promotions, Inc.
