(Names changed to protect the innocent).
The middle of 2013 I was working with a new client to get help them generate more leads. We had a good size list of high value, prospective clients. If we got one sale it would pay for the direct mail campaign – which by the way is how you play business smart.
Since this client was familiar with direct marketing, as we do it in these parts – I am a Dan Kennedy Certified Copywriter, he is intimately familiar with Dan Kennedy and his marketing philosophy. This lead to me making several assumptions as you will see later.
So we put together a simple 3 step mailing to get my client some leads. We both understood that this was about testing the market. There are lots of things we can do in order to make it more successful in the future, if the test came back positive. We were looking to generate sales appointments.
Away we went, I wrote what I thought was a pretty good campaign – 3 letters to be sent 2 weeks apart.
The client approves the letters. While we were scoping the project I found the sub section of the list that is most likely to respond to the offer. Mailing test list drops from 1000 to 200. Client thinks I am a genius. I suppose I am when I work list magic like this.
My client sends his secretary off to print the letters and get them in the post.
Mailing step 1 goes out. No response.
4 weeks go by, my client gets step 2 out 2 weeks late (later admits it is half of mailing step 2). Still no response.
I’m explaining the reality of the maths at this point, ‘when you do a 3 step direct mail campaign, you do all of it – then analyse the results.’ ‘Response is better to the second and third step.’ ‘not a big difference between 0 and 1 response – numbers wise is there’
At this point 2 things happen. The regulations change for the industry that we’ve targeted and they aren’t going to be worth chasing as clients anymore (valuable lesson about market selection).
Secondly, he gets a cease and desist letter from the industry’s regulator. I had engineered in a second way for this campaign to be a success – he might be able to get the regulator to refer him clients as a preferred vendor. But none the less we are dead in the water with this campaign.
Another 2 weeks go by. At this point I got a sheepish note from my client – Turns out he’s had 5 email responses – that he has only seen and that the phone number he put in the letter hasn’t been answered – the people he emailed back all said it was engaged and they had each tried it at least 3 times.
1.6% response would have been an outrageous success for this client. Good copy was nearly sabotaged by not testing the phone number and the email address. I screwed this up by not checking the response mechanism – I am to blame here too.
Be sure that you test your response mechanisms before you go out and spend money on media. It can save you a lot of stress.