Month: May 2014

Does your direct marketing need a Letter Doctor?

I started my direct marketing career in the 1980s, a quaint bygone era when there was no internet. One of my favorite resources was a perfect bound magazine called Direct Marketing and one of my favorite contributors to said magazine was Luther Brock, “The Letter Doctor”.

Brock would take a sort of self-help approach to copy critique. He would pick a common marketing problem, present a few paragraphs from a letter (possibly not a real one) that was not solving the problem so well, then make suggestions for improvement. It was a diagnostic approach: you know things are supposed to be a certain way, but they’re not; what’s wrong, and why? Of course he was promoting his own services as a freelance copywriter, but there was lots of good information to a fledging.

I expect Luther Brock is no longer among us. A 1958 graduate of a Denton, TX high school is listed on the internets as the owner of a business called The Letter Doctor, so this is probably Luther’s son. Another person, I assume unrelated, owns the domain lettterdoctor.com and markets from that website. The original Letter Doctor probably never saw any reason to claim the domain name; what was an internet domain anyway and who cared? (In the very early days of the World Wide Web, we looked up numerical domain identifiers, not names.)

I found myself invoking the spirit of the Letter Doctor today when a client asked me to take a look at some not-successful lead generation direct mail. There were some bullet points of features and benefits: did they really know those were the most powerful message to their audience? There was an informational offer: was it really the best appeal to the target reader, and was it stated appropriately? In short, this robust and experienced company needed a checkup, same as any of us.

Do you have a letter doctor–someone who’s willing to poke and probe and make recommendations based on how your marketing differs from expectations? If not, it might be worthwhile to seek one out.

When you want LESS response to your marketing, do this

The Freakonomics authors present an interesting theory in their new book, Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain. Why is it that, in spite of all the publicity and ridicule visited on “Nigerian scam” emails in which someone you don’t know will visit you with huge sums in return for sharing your bank account routing information, those emails are still sent from alleged Nigerians? Wouldn’t they get a better response with a new scam sent from, maybe, Crimea?

The answer, according to Levitt and Dubner, is that the scammers WANT a lower response. Sending out mass emails is free, but manipulating the mark who responds is not. Therefore the scammers want to limit their responders to only the truly most gullible who believe that, regardless of past disappointments, there may still be a pony under that pile of poop.

This has application for your own marketing if you have a sales organization that must process the leads you generate through email, direct mail or search advertising. Offer a free tcotchke or entry into a drawing for an iPad and you’ll boost the response, but many of those alleged prospects are responding just for the freebie. Not only are they worthless as leads,  they cost you money because they get in the way of opportunities to follow up other, better qualified responses.

There are several ways to get fewer but better qualified responses:

  • Offer a premium that is only of interest to someone who meets your definition of a qualified buyer. Everyone wants an iPad; only a few want a poster with functional diagrams of vector network analysis yet that offer was highly effective for one of my clients.
  • Make them do something to get the freebie. Ask them to provide complete and accurate contact information and answer a few questions about buying authority and plans. (If you’re giving away something, they will be motivated to fill in correct information to be sure you can reach them.) Make them fill out a survey. In effect, they’re working for the reward so it’s no longer “free”.
  • Or, don’t offer anything, other than a “complimentary consultation” which is a thinly disguised sales pitch. This is what your sales reps want you to do, because it will only produce very well qualified leads. You normally won’t do it because there will be a disappointing number of leads and your cost per lead will be extremely high. But sometimes this is the right way to go.

With an improving economy, lead quality becomes increasingly important. Try a few of these tactics in your next campaign.