Warm Calls after Direct Mail

BHopkins · Dec 18, 2014

I have a friend online who mailed out 20 letters to people/companies with reputation issues. Before he was able to follow up with a phone call (about a week after mailing), someone called him to get more information. In a small sample, that's a 5% response rate which is fantastic. If you mail 100 letters you would get 5 calls, if you can close 1 of those, you would have a 1% closing rate on the direct mail pieces. That is an easy to scale process.

What do you think?

Zwielicht · Jan 6, 2015

It certainly sounds fine to me. Once he understands and optimises the process manually, your friend could outsource the email work (or automate it assuming it doesn't negatively affect your conversion rates significantly) or even outsource the phone work to save himself time to focus on more clients.

Repair Reputation · Jan 6, 2015

I am truly surprised at that type of return when working on cold leads within the ORM industry. Personally, my company had worked pretty hard at this with little to no leads and zero sales. I don't think our issue was with presentation or anything else. I have found that the truth of the matter is that most companies with significant reputation issues usually are looking for a reputation management firm. Over a six month time frame we have closed 40% of our incoming leads. I invested significant resources in out going calls, mail, and email so WOW I am impressed with that type of return. I ran a three month campaign and got ZERO clients. Congrats, keep up doing what you are doing.

BHopkins · Jan 6, 2015

I've never done a whole lot of outbound marketing or cold calling in this industry. This could easily be an outlier and a small sample size, but I was impressed to see an actual deal out of it!

Repair Reputation · Jan 7, 2015

I am beyond impressed Brandon I am blown away. I mean think about it - you get some stranger who calls you to say - "hey you have a reputation issue" - that is a hard one to stomach. I do believe if you had a scraper that could pull Ripoff Reports as they came in or something like that you could get someone who was really scared and needed that work, otherwise, crazy!

Liaata · Jan 7, 2015

My business is selling local SEO and we mailed 50 people.
Out of these we closed 2 so far, maybe one more to come.
Mailing wokrs very well if you put some thought into the letter.

BHopkins · Jan 7, 2015

Good to hear Liaata! Care to share some secrets? You're in Germany, so were your clients also German?

Liaata · Jan 11, 2015

Yes my clients are all German.
I used the dice-trick and told them to not gamble and hire me instead.
I also added a couple of interesting keywords with search volume of their niche.

BHopkins · Jan 11, 2015

Liaata said:
Yes my clients are all German.
I used the dice-trick and told them to not gamble and hire me instead.
I also added a couple of interesting keywords with search volume of their niche.

That's a great twist, "Don't gamble with your reputation." I like it!

1337WuLF · Feb 16, 2015

high risk processing said:
I used dice for Real Estate marketing and would type-up or pay someone to do hand write letters (I came up with the pitch they just wrote it out) and it worked very well. I also used colored envelopes, as we all know that colored envelopes are not scary because they don't represent a bill.

Did you test between coloured and non coloured envelopes?

kalios · Apr 5, 2015

Direct mail results will all boil down to what's included in your letter(s) to the prospect. If the content is all about that specific person, such as 'Mr X here's what I found about your site on google', then there's a better chance he's going to call you. And yes, it's easier to warm up a prospect by mailing them than barging in with a cold call (over the phone or locally in an office). Though you might just send a business card with 'shocking statistics about your online reputation' printout and a link to your 'factual' facebook page with helpful tips about ORM where you get leads.

sasjones · Apr 5, 2015

I have tried a similar method to this in the past, regarding the dice and I'd suggest to,anyone who plans to send letters,out to include dice or ant other funky object.

duzkerotzki · May 10, 2015

Interesting. I sent out 50 letters on wednesday. Didn't receive a call yet. Will followup on tuesday.

Avid Learner · Jun 3, 2015

Repair Reputation said:
I am truly surprised at that type of return when working on cold leads within the ORM industry. Personally, my company had worked pretty hard at this with little to no leads and zero sales. I don't think our issue was with presentation or anything else. I have found that the truth of the matter is that most companies with significant reputation issues usually are looking for a reputation management firm. Over a six month time frame we have closed 40% of our incoming leads. I invested significant resources in out going calls, mail, and email so WOW I am impressed with that type of return. I ran a three month campaign and got ZERO clients. Congrats, keep up doing what you are doing.

I'd like to hear what characteristics the OP's friend used to target their mailing.

I suspect certain types of prospects are better at converting to a sale than others, and that is just something we don't know in this case to make a judgement call on how good it is.

Sounds pretty good if it was just random small businesses, but does it hold up long term? It's been a while so maybe there is an update.

Awesome if it was Fortune 500. Maybe awful if it was all sole proprietor Dentists (just to make up a category).

BHopkins · Jun 3, 2015

Avid Learner said:
I'd like to hear what characteristics the OP's friend used to target their mailing.

He was looking for clients with negative listings on Google.com. I don't remember exactly what site he was targeting, but you could do PissedConsumer, RipOffReport, Yelp, etc.

Find businesses that are listed on PC, then google their business and you've found someone with a need.

fc-dh · Jun 3, 2015

When i was prospecting for local businesses back in the day --yes grandpa talks

-- no back in 2012/13 when i was starting out i used direct mail too, now i sold leads fr service business like plumbers and painters and stuff, i gave them 10 free phone leads to try at no obligation to them, first i used a 50 letters in a business envelope (like your bills are often in) and i had no response, the next 50 letters (some to the same companies) were sent in a white envelope with the address handwritten.

I got 9 calls and eventually closed 6 clients, now every time i lost a client i used the same tactic a letter in a handwritten white envelope, just small tip there are some great handwritten fonts out there and open office does have a envelope mockup that you can use to print them if you don't wanna write them

Avid Learner · Jun 4, 2015

BHopkins said:
He was looking for clients with negative listings on Google.com. I don't remember exactly what site he was targeting, but you could do PissedConsumer, RipOffReport, Yelp, etc.

Find businesses that are listed on PC, then google their business and you've found someone with a need.

Thanks!

Certainly a good way to narrow one's target, but hard to tell if 5% is good or not in a relative sense. But, given the effort and investment, if it can be consistently around that point, it would be very nice, indeed.

Avid Learner · Jun 4, 2015

fc-dh said:
... the next 50 letters (some to the same companies) were sent in a white envelope with the address handwritten.

I got 9 calls and eventually closed 6 clients, now every time i lost a client i used the same tactic a letter in a handwritten white envelope, just small tip there are some great handwritten fonts out there and open office does have a envelope mockup that you can use to print them if you don't wanna write them

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought about handwritten addresses - it certainly would be attention getting in this world of junk mail.

BHopkins · Jun 4, 2015

Avid Learner said:
Thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought about handwritten addresses - it certainly would be attention getting in this world of junk mail.

There are a lot of handwriting fonts as well. If you were clever, you could even use strikethrough to make it look like you made a mistake. That would surely increase open rates.

mihirseth · Jun 10, 2015

BHopkins said:
I have a friend online who mailed out 20 letters to people/companies with reputation issues. Before he was able to follow up with a phone call (about a week after mailing), someone called him to get more information. In a small sample, that's a 5% response rate which is fantastic. If you mail 100 letters you would get 5 calls, if you can close 1 of those, you would have a 1% closing rate on the direct mail pieces. That is an easy to scale process.

What do you think?

Sounds like a lot of people these days have got their reputation to protect.

I wonder if this method can be replicated online too

Warm Calls after Direct Mail

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