At Long Last...A Good Use for Junk Mail!

By Stacy Karacostas

Ahhhhhh, junk mail. We all get it, and we all seem to hate it. Yet I’d swear there are more low-interest credit card offers, magazine subscriptions and letters asking for money packing my mailbox every day.

And it just keeps coming, no matter how much of it ends up in my recycling bin.

One day I started to wonder about this never-ending stream of sales pitches, solicitations and such. Because if everybody hates it so much, who’s reading it? And if nobody’s reading it, nobody’s buying—which means the companies sending out all this mail they must be losing money.

But that’s not the case at all. Whether we like it or not, direct mail (which is what us marketing professional like to call it), is actually one of the most effective marketing strategies out there.

Think about it…
There’s only one reason why junk mail keeps filling our mailboxes. Because it works!

In fact, direct mail is huge business. Major corporations literally pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have the nation’s top marketing and copywriting professionals carefully craft and test those crazy, elaborate packets filled with letters, notes, cards stickers and return envelopes.

It costs them a small fortune, but it makes them an even bigger fortune.

What does all this mean to you? If you are in sales, or own a business (which is the same thing) you have daily, no-cost access to examples of some of the most effective sales and copywriting techniques out there!

How do I know they’re so effective? Because the folks that mail all that “junk” to your door spend months carefully testing everything from the headline to the offer, body copy, PS and the “teaser copy” on the envelope. And they tweak, edit and rearrange one detail at a time until they find the combination that gets the best response.

So sure, you could use all that junk mail to paper your gerbil’s cage. Or start a fire in your wood stove. But if you did you’d be missing out.

Instead, at least a couple of times a week you should open up some of that mail and look at the way it’s written. Study everything about it—from the outside of the envelope to the graphic elements. Then think long and hard about why it caught your attention, what the sender is trying to get you do, and how they are getting you to do it.

Ask yourself, “Who is this piece of mail geared towards (the target market)”?

If it doesn’t appeal to you, try to figure out why not. Is it the offer? The language? Or are you simply not a part of the target market?

If you think it is geared towards one of your target markets, study it extra-carefully.

And whenever you find an example that you think is especially powerful, save it for future reference.

There’s a tremendous amount of thought and psychology that goes into creating really effective written sales pitches. Once you figure out what these top copywriters are doing, you can use the same techniques to improve your own sales efforts—both in writing and in person.

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