Best Ever Direct Mail – Getting Business
So far in our “Best Ever Direct Mail” series, we featured these fundraising appeals from the Nature Conservancy of Canada and the National Psoriasis Foundation.
But agencies and consultants need to prospect too. And a couple have shared their winning business pitch letters with The Agitator.
First is a letter from consumer advocate and (self-described) “secret direct marketer” Charles Langley. He describes his package thusly:
I mailed it in an illuminated envelope on a rag parchment emblazoned with a wax signet and sealed with a scarlet ribbon that had to be cut in order to open the envelope. The final letter looked like something torn from the Book of Kells, or a dispatch from an Arthurian knight.
Then, to see how agencies prospect for business in the UK, try this letter from Hamilton House Mailings. Says Tony Attwood:
With a limited budget we needed to create ourselves as a brand – a direct mail company with a difference, such that everyone in our industry would know about us, even though we were stuck out in the country in a county that they probably couldn't properly place on a map.We pondered the glossy brochure – but our rivals could out-gloss us at a moment's notice. We pondered quirky mailings with pop up match-boxes and odd coloured egg boxes, but none of the research we saw ever suggested that this gave prolonged returns as a brand building exercise.So then we had an idea – quite simply our regular ordinary A5 sized 16 page on colour catalogue – exactly as normal – but with a sales letter so utterly different from anything else in the marketplace that it would be remembered …Of course the style has changed over the years – we now write the pieces a bit like a soap opera, based around a run-down English pub where the local marketing folk hang out, insult their customers, and generally lose the plot. In the UK we built a brand, totally based on sales letters.
Behavioral Science Q & A
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