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In Bob Stone's new book, "Direct Marketing Success Stories" from NTC Publishing, Stone chose 13 direct marketers to write about "how they overcame obstacles and turned fledgling ideas into long-term profits." One chapter is by this monthly columnist. At the end of his chapter, the author shares 30 secrets on retail direct mail he learned in 30 years. Here they are.
1. It's far, far easier to sell to the customer you have than to sell a new customer. Most businesses spend six times as much money for new customers as they do for the customer they already have. Ridiculous. Easy cure for this misdirection: Direct Mail.
2. Limited time. The tighter the time frame of the promotion, the more successful. We were so excited about the success of Neiman Marcus' "fortnight" promotion that we duplicated the idea with an Ireland theme. We scheduled something every day for two weeks including Atlantic City's first St. Patrick's Day parade. Biggest failure we ever had. Our analysis after the fact: it was too long a time period. Three days would have worked. One day would have been terrific.
3. Running a sale when other stores are closed brings in more customers. We once ran a "Midnight Madness" sale for a supermarket. Crowds started forming at 10 p.m. By 11, all the shopping carts were gone, and those people just arriving began to bid for carts held by others. By midnight, the carts were selling for $20 each. Works as well for an "Early Bird" sale that starts at G a.m. And readers of this column will remember our New Year's Day Sale that we ran on New Year's Day, when every other store in town was closed. For 27 consecutive years, we did more business in three hours than we did any other WEEK of the year!
4. Running a sale with a sweepstakes increases traffic from 10 to 20 percent. Or more. When we mailed a "SALE" notice to our customers, the average response was 5 to 8 percent. When we added a sweepstakes, the return jumped from 10 to 12 percent.
5. Running a sale with a sweepstakes and adding the customer's name on the sweepstakes entry increases traffic an additional 5 to 10...