Lazy Mass Marketing, Stop it!

This morning I had some post at the office. Just the usual basic white envelope, in a pre-printed 2nd class envelope, addressed to “Appware”. I rarely get any actual physical letters so even though I assumed it would be junk mail, I still wondered what it was and opened it.

Sure enough, inside was a printed 12 page booklet about an online sales product. This was a product I’ve never heard of, from a company I’ve had no previous contact with. Obviously, their brochure has already gone straight in the bin.

It got me thinking how these days, there’s just no excuse for this type of lazy mass marketing. Surely, their conversion rates for this type of campaign must be minuscule. They are just playing a numbers game, and instead of doing things better, they are just buying bigger and bigger lists, and printing more brochures.

So how would I suggest they approach it?

Firstly, people assume that as someone who works in tech, that I’d tell them that the world has moved on, and that physical post is a waste of time. Wrong. Now that most people are purely using online marketing, I think there’s a great opportunity to use physical post to stand out from everyone else. How many cold “buy my stuff” emails do you get compared to even lazy approaches like my letter? Loads!

So this is how I’d do it…

Firstly, once I’d established whatever I was selling was a great fit for a company, I’d Google that company to try and find the right person’s name. In this day of social media (Especially using LinkedIn, Facebook etc) in most cases I’d be able to find the right persons name in less than a minute.

I’d then hand write a coloured envelope with their name and address. If you received an orange envelope say, with your name and address hand written, you’d be sure to open it. So that’s the first objective achieved.

Inside the envelope I’d not just include the brochure, but a note explaining why I think the product would be a good fit for them. And I don’t just meant the same generic letter to everyone, something personalised to that company, based on what I’d read about them that I found genuinely interesting.

I’d then follow up online with a LinkedIn request or similar, to remind them who I was, and to check if they’d received it. I’d then try and arrange a quick phone call to see what they thought. Even if the product wasn’t a good fit, that conversation would no doubt be useful from a feedback perspective. If the product was a good fit, at least we’d have already started to establish a relationship that could lead on to a sale.

As you can see from the above, this isn’t rocket science. It does however take a little more effort that simply adding a company name and address to a database. Even if each company you approach takes 10 minutes, the rewards of doing so would far far outweigh this extra effort. And not just in terms of sales figures, but in the personal fulfilment that comes from actually speaking to people, and building real relationships.

Thanks

Richard