It’s ironic that one of the most effective ways today to market products and services online is through offline marketing. This can be especially effective when used in an offline to online to offline strategy.
What I mean by that is that your mailer or ad includes your url and your telephone number. The url gives the reader the opportunity to learn more about your product or service before you talk to them. Some may call you. For those who do not, you can follow up with a phone call. People are much more receptive to these kinds of follow up calls rather than cold calls.
It was right on his desk
In a recent campaign I did, I followed up with one prospect and asked him if he had seen my mailer. He answered, “I did, in fact, it’s right here on my desk.†He had also visited my website. Needless to say this made for a pretty easy conversion, and turned out to be a great client.
Postcards reach an audience where email might be filtered out or just overlooked. If the postcard is good, it attracts attention. Make sure to have your url and telephone number on the card. But there is an even easier way to use offline marketing. The humble flyer.
Flyer Power
Instead of printing thousands of postcards, and realizing afterwards that something was wrong, or another headline or photo would’ve worked better, flyers enable you to test creative in whatever small numbers you want.
Now, instead of printing all 500 or 1,000 postcards, you could test a small sample of your list. Let’s say you want to test 100. You could send one headline to 50 people (group A) and the other headline to the other 50 (group B). Or, use one image for group A and another image for goup B.
You would then need to set up a different landing page for each group. So the flyer for Group A is directed to url A, and group B is directed to url B. Then you can track which creative work draws the most people. As in the postcards, make sure your telephone number is also on the flyers.
Cheap but highly effective
And since most desktop printers are fine for flyers, the cost for a test campaign would be minimal. You could send out 100 flyers for under $50. For that amount you could get an idea of what creative works best for your postcard rollout.
But flyers can be so effective that sometimes you won’t have to do a rollout. Not too long ago I did a very small test campaign, sending flyers to just 25 prospects.
About 15 % called me, and proved to be highly motivated propects. I followed up and reached about another 50%. A fair number of those had seen the mailing and had gone to the website. In 4 months time, the campaign yielded an additional $70,000+ in fees, for just one service.
When you’re marketing a service, generally a phone call is what closes the deal. By leading off with a good mailer leading prospects to a well-done landing page, your follow up calls become so much easier and much more effective.
Are you doing offline to online to offline marketing?
If it suits your business you may want to give it a try. Start off by creating some flyers. Take the ones that stand out and print them out. Do bunch and see which one merits taking to the next step. If you want assistance in creating an offline to online to offline marketing check out my coaching programs.
For guidance in offline-to-online-to-offline marketing, click here
That’s my ‘next step’ is some offline direct marketing, as I have tried niche-specific magazine advertising and barely broke even. Direct marketing looks very appealing if done correctly.