Hey guys, what's up? This is Seth and in this video, I want to talk about a few ways to really be tricky with direct mail, to almost sort of force people to notice the mail piece that you send them. So, if you've ever done direct mail before, you probably know that it's really a numbers game. It's all about sending out just as many mail
pieces as you can. And hopefully if you're doing stuff right, a certain percentage of those recipients will not only notice what you're sending them, but they will read it and respond to it. But the problem with direct mail is
it takes a ton of mail because many, many, many, many
people are going to totally ignore you. Probably throw away your mail piece
before they even open the thing. And that gets really expensive and
it's just not that effective. And it's almost kind of like disheartening
to know that you're spending that much money that is literally just being thrown away. So how can you be more effective? I mean, how can you really make your mail
piece stand out and make your message be heard? First of all, kind of a critical underlying
component of this is reaching out to people that actually need what you're offering them. You can't really trick your way into getting somebody to respond to you and actually do business with them At some point, if the person doesn't need
which you're offering them, it's not going to happen. So really the way to win at this is to send
out a mail piece that when somebody sees it, they just instinctively know
I need to take a closer look at this. This is not something I can just throw away
without even looking at it. It's all about putting yourself in
the mind of your recipient and asking yourself, what would this person have to open
if I sent this to them, like they would be crazy to throw it away. And a lot of big companies out there are terrible at this. I mean their direct mail just screams, throw me away. I'm junk mail. I mean if you've ever seen a piece of mail like this, like a credit card offer, something like that. I mean, you just know it's garbage or something like this. I mean like what is this thing? Just like some piece of plastic that somebody sent me and I'm supposed to care about this? No, garbage. Or something like this. I mean it's just, it's stupid? But what if you got something in the mail
that looked like this, like an actual FedEx package that somebody spent $20 to overnight to you? Are you going to throw that away or are you going to open that up? Just think about that. What would you do? And the downside to this as you can imagine, is that it's going to cost you something. It's not cheap to send out hundreds
or thousands of these things. But you're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to get a list that is
whittled down very, very intentionally through something called List Stacking. So we're not just going to download a list from a data service of certain property owners who live in a certain area and send out
thousands of these things. We're going to get that list first and then
run it through another filter so that that list goes from a thousand
to say 10 or 20 people. So these are very, very, very specific individuals who not only meet that first criteria, but they also meet a totally separate criteria of say, people who recently died and maybe we're trying to reach out to their heirs or maybe even people who are currently incarcerated and we're trying to reach
their family on the outside. I mean when it comes to list decking, there's all kinds of secondary ways that
you can filter these lists so that you're not just sending
your mail to anybody and everybody and you're not even just sending it to people who own specific types of properties or meet some other specific criteria. You're going even further so that your list
gets much, much smaller. And only at that point is it justifiable to
start spending a lot more money on these leads because frankly, they're worth a lot more
and there's a much higher likelihood that they will end up doing business with you
because you know how to meet their need. When it comes to sending out these
more expensive pieces of mail that are very, very hard to ignore what are your options? One option, as we just kind of discussed is
this FedEx package idea, and it doesn't have to be FedEx, it could be UPS, it could be a United States postal service flat rate cardboard envelope, anything that conveys this message that, Hey, somebody sent you a very important message and they spent some money to get this to you. Like this is not something to throw away. This is something to sit down, take a minute and really look closely at. And I think any kind of message you send, whether it's one or two pages or something much more complex or an actual physical item, whatever it might be, if it's in one of these envelopes that you just
frankly have to pay more money to send, people are going to notice that and they're going to give you the time of day. So, in terms of what your message should be, that kind of depends obviously on
who your recipient is and what you're trying to
communicate to them. And I think if you've already
got a message that you know works, like if the copywriting is very good, if people do respond to it, then you probably don't need to mess with perfection if it's already getting results for you. It could be that your message is already perfect. It's just that your mode of delivery is not quite there yet and that's where this kind of cardboard mailer
envelope could really be handy. So, if you don't have a message nailed down yet or maybe you've tried but it's just not quite
delivering at this point. Another option that you might consider is
something known as the video card, and this is something I've actually never even
gotten one of these before. I had to order this thing as a sample from
a company called Cards in Motion. There's actually another company called a
Red Paper Plan that does a very similar thing, but I'm not sure if you've ever
gotten one of these things, but just in case you haven't, I'll show you how it works. So you get this kind of card and this is actually like the sales copy
from the company Cards in Motion that you could provide whatever kind of graphics or marketing material you wanted to
if you went this direction. But when you get this kind of card, you open it up and this is what happens. I mean the average person encounters approximately 5,000 marketing messages each day. And your challenge is to cut through the clutter and make a meaningful impression. We've become so congested with digital noise like So, I'm not going to let that whole thing play. It goes for a couple of minutes. But the idea behind this is you get
this kind of card inside it, it is a tiny LCD screen. This particular one is five inches. So, it's about the size of like an iPhone
or an Android phone and that all it does is
it just plays a video message. When you open the thing, it just starts playing automatically. I think the biggest drawback to
these by far is just the cost. I believe you have to make a minimum
order of 50 of these things and you can either have them
mailed directly to your recipient from the company Cards in Motion. They're actually based in Canada or you can have them book shipped to yourself. Then you can upload your own video onto these and send them out individually as you need to. And when you make this order, if they send it out for you, you can actually upload the video and your graphics so that they have everything they need
to just send it out. Or you can do all that stuff for yourself. And these actually come in a little box thing that you can see right here though folds up. So you can actually put this in one of those
FedEx envelopes if you want it to. This particular one actually came in
a DHL envelope because it came from Canada and it also comes with this little charging cord and these things, I believe last up to
90 minutes when they're fully charged. So if you had a one minute video, it could play up to 90 times before it would have to be recharged and if you want to change out the video that's on there, you can literally just plug it into your computer and it's kind of like a flash drive or you can remove the old video
and put a new one on there. And I believe you can set these up so that they can even play multiple videos. I think one common use for this kind of thing is when people send out video testimonials
to their clients. When I talked to the people from
Cards in Motion, that was what they told me is that
that's a particularly effective use of these. But just the idea of not only standing out
and looking very different from every other package in somebody's mailbox, when somebody opens it, a lot of people do better with watching a video than they do with reading whatever
copy you put on there. And there's just a lot of stuff you can do
with video that you can't do with anything else and it's really only limited to your imagination. If you can think of a really useful effective
way to communicate your message by video, even if that's just like a selfie video
where you hold out your phone and take a video of yourself, that could be all you need to do or you can just go nuts and have like
Hollywood production quality if you want to do that too. But I think just the video medium in general, if how to communicate well over that
kind of visual audio platform, it could be a really effective way to do it. And again, I think the main drawback is the cost. I believe if you do order 50 these things, they cost around $35 a piece. So, I think if I was using this I would probably order like 50 or a 100 of them and send them right to me and I would only do that if I had a very specific use and I knew that I was going to use
them in the short term. But if that's you and who you are
then this could be worth considering. Again, Cards and Motion is the place that
this particular card came from and there's also Red Paper Plan and I think the pricing from what
I've seen is relatively similar and the product isn't that different
from one another. I think there are some subtle differences
from one to the next, like the quality of the screen or maybe the speakers that are used and that kind of thing, but by and large like it's the same general concept. So, you could check out either one of those
websites if you're just in that. And by the way, neither one of them is paying me anything to mention them in this video. I'm just mentioning them because
those are the two that I've found and the Cards in Motion anyway seems
to have a pretty good a quality product. So now that we've covered some of the ridiculously expensive options that are out there maybe you're not too excited about spending
like $30 to $50 per mail piece to send these things out. I totally get that. I frankly wouldn't be either unless like
there was a very, very specific recipient that I was very certain would at least be interested in talking more about what I had to offer them. But if you just don't want to spend that much or say if you want to be able to send out a lot more
to people and still get noticed, another option that you might consider is
one of these handwritten cards that almost looks like a birthday card
or a handwritten "Thank You" card and that when I see handwritten card,
I'm really not kidding. Like these things look very, very legit. I actually ordered a couple of these and sent them to myself just so I could show you what I'm talking about. So, these particular ones are from a company
called handwrytten.com wrytten with a Y
Not an I So, in this one as you can see,
this is the front of it. So, in my case, like my message isn't necessarily saying like "Thank You" or "Happy Birthday" because this is the first time I'm contacting somebody. I know they also have examples that say like "Bonjour" and things like that. So, it's kind of up to you to use whatever
you think would fit the situation. But when you open these things up, that's my sample message that I wrote in there. Take a look at those 5s there. And the phone number that I wrote out. They actually look different. It's not like every single 5 is a carbon copy of itself. Like it sort of looks like somebody who
wrote that out by hand. Just in terms of looking like
an actual handwritten card seems like a pretty good option to me. And let's check out this other one here. I'm going to open this one up. Here's this one. You can see this was the thing that
I chose to have on the front. It's just a little graphic image type thing. Then we can open it up. You can see what that says in there and get an idea for what that handwriting looks like. It looks pretty real. I mean, I would actually think that
that's a real handwritten note and I think the downside to this is that it doesn't stand out quite as well in somebody's mailbox. I mean it's pretty small. It's not like it's going to jump out or scream, hey, somebody spent $20 to send this to you overnight. It doesn't have that kind of effect. But I mean it does look very handwritten and not like your typical junk mail that comes through. So, I don't know, it could be worth considering. Again, these examples were from handwrytten.com I know another one that does
a very similar thing, it's called postable.com I've not worked with that particular company yet, but I know of others who have
and they've been pretty happy with it. And just to give you an idea and the cost of these, when you take the price of the item, which is normally $3.25 plus postage and taxes, I paid $4.03 cents for one of these and I received the mail about a week
after I placed the order. So just to give you an idea for the cost and how long it takes to deliver these things. So, it's definitely not as cheap as sending out like a postcard for 40 to 50 cents apiece. I mean $3 to $4 can add up a lot faster, but it's a lot cheaper than like
$20 to $30 to $50 a mail piece. So, I think it could definitely be worth considering. And honestly like when I look at how easy
that was for me to do this, it was actually like a lot faster than me
handwriting a "Thank You" card by hand. So, in the future when I have to write "Thank You" cards, I think I'm actually going to use handwrytten.com instead of doing it myself
because it was way easier. Something else that I noticed on handwrytten.com in a way when I was going through
that order process is that you can actually have them include gift cards from a bunch of different companies. Say if you were sending somebody
an actual birthday card or if you really wanted to get somebody's attention by giving them some kind of monetary value
inside the card that you send them or even just notice something hard in the envelope before they open the thing and don't throw it away. that could be another thing worth considering. Again, that would obviously add considerably
to the cost of each mail piece, but it might be worth thinking about
if it fits the situation. So again, a lot of these things do not make
a whole lot of sense when you're sending out thousands of mailers, unless those thousands of prospects
really are highly qualified and you were able to find that many of them. I would only consider doing this
if I had like a hundred or fewer of them. And I was very, very sure about all the recipients and the likelihood that they would
actually want to work with me. But that's just me. So, I'm going to have links to
all this stuff beneath this video. Again, I'm not telling you about this stuff because I'm making money from it because I'm not. I just thought these were really helpful services and kind of good ideas to think about if you want to really stand out and force people to notice your mail in their mailbox. So, thanks for watching. Wish you all the best. See you next time.
