I have been thinking about highlighting effective offline methods to generate sales leads for a while and I just ran across this video (on YouTube) produced Erik Holmes of SendOutCards.com. They don’t have an affiliate program that I know of and this is NOT a paid endorsement.

The main lesson in the video is to send personal, handwritten, thoughtful, cards instead of sales-driven, logo-riddled, letters that go straight to the garbage as junk mail. Essentially, it is more effective to send a “Happy Thanksgiving Day” card with no sales information than to send a letter reminding your leads or prospects about what you sell.

I liked this video because Erik actually gives a how-to lesson with strong examples of what makes a good card and what makes a bad card and they don’t sell themselves until the very end.

The basic rules for creating an effective card include:

• Letter size envelope
• Handwritten address
• Real stamp
• No logos or advertising
• Nice greeting card with handwritten note

Although the cards from SendOutCards are machine printed, they are printed with your handwriting and signature which you give to them by downloading their form, filling it out with your handwriting, and mailing the form to them. You can include a family picture and even a pre-paid gift card (many to choose from).

I also dug up a few good blogs about using postcards (aka self-mailers) and direct mail marketing. The postcardsmart blog includes some good information and the site has a good article about incorporating your website into your postcard marketing. The Sharpe & Direct direct blog has a great article covering the advantages and disadvantages of using self-mailers (ahem, postcards) in B2B direct mail campaigns.

And finally, Kevin H. Johnson of Acxiom discusses a few of the differences between online and offline direct marketing.

Due to the cost of offline contact, traditional direct marketers must carefully select their target audience for maximum potential response.

The typical direct marketing campaign starts with an offer and the universe of consumers. Direct marketers then “cut a list” – a small subset of the prospect universe – by carefully eliminating great swaths of the population who are less likely to respond to the offer. Thus the key to good direct marketing is good list selection.

“The true divide between digital and direct marketing is driven by one simple economic fact: cost per incremental online contact is effectively zero.”

Good e-mail marketers, on the other hand, take precisely the opposite approach. They start with every person for whom they have permission to mail and then carefully select the best offer for each individual on the list – every ZIP code, DMA, Simmons segment, Personicx cluster, every single address.

Digital marketers have no economic reason not to contact everyone, short of increasing opt-outs through over-mailing. Hence the key to good digital marketing is good offer selection.

I have used direct mail campaigns to increase the awareness of a website (and the company) across a given region and have been successful but direct mail marketing does not work for every situation.

In a B2B setting, I have found direct mail marketing is most effective for website promotion when you are marketing to a group of buyers who historically look no further than the people they have been buying from for years. In this situation, direct mail marketing is an excellent way to introduce yourself as a new option.

If you ever want to chat about website promotion and lead optimization, email me at chris@leadoptimize.com. I love this stuff.

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