Go Postal

More than once every week, I talk with people about best practices in prospecting. With all the technology advances, web sophistication, and targeted e-mail strategies, I've not found anything better (yet) than a good direct mail campaign.

I was thrilled to get an ezine from the head of Exact Target, a successful targeted e-mail company, touting the value of old fashioned "snail mail" for the purposes of prospecting.

Founding partner Chris Baggott says this about direct mail:

Let me say it now: Email is a terrible prospecting tool. Don't do it!

You know what makes a great prospecting tool? Old fashioned direct mail. People still respond pretty much like they always have to traditional direct mail....which is usually not too great. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be part of your prospecting arsenal. In fact, the ability to now track and measure direct mail means that there are big opportunities for improvement.

There are three components that make a great prospect direct mail campaign:

1. Your Goal
2. Your Target List
3. Your Tracking/Testing Mechanism

Set Your Goals
The goal part is easy. As you know, the goal of a prospecting campaign is not necessarily to get the final conversion with this first touch point. Remember the marriage analogy from Permission Marketing? Our goal isn't to get married right out of the gate. Our goal is to get permission to begin exploring a potential relationship.

With that said, your offer should be something easy for the prospect to act upon. Don't make them get in a car, or even pick up the phone! Leading prospects to a specific landing page is the easiest thing to do. From there you can make your next offer, which should be another easy step such as asking them to opt-in to your email database. Remember: the focus has to be on something that gives the customer a benefit.

Identify Your Target Audience

Tracking / Testing
Finally, you have your conversion goal and you have your database. How do you track and test?

First, you should develop a few different versions of your mailing. Once you have done so, take a random sample of your master list and break them into the same number of segments.

In order to track the success of each version, it is critical to have separate landing pages for each test. For example: Version A should go to www.mypizzashop/pizza1; Version B should go to www.mypizzashop/pizza2. By doing this, you will be able to see which offer drove more traffic to your landing page. From there, you should also track opt-ins, but you shouldn't necessarily determine a "winner" based on the opt-in/activity results generated once within the page. Remember: The goal of the Prospect Mailer is to get people to the site. The goal of the site is to get the opt-in. So measure these separately.

Once you have a winner, this becomes your control version. Mail that version to the majority of your list. You should always have at least one test version to accompany every control-and the process should never end. You should never get to the ONE mailer that is the be-all and end-all of driving traffic. You must constantly challenge the champ to prove that it is still the champ.

You can see Chris' blog here. It's great advice, and the web strategies really leverage the postal mail into a seriously powerful combo. Now for the follow up calls!!