Direct Marketing To A Starving Crowd
From:
WAY West of Jewfish Creek
Dear Friend & Subscriber,
You are about to read eight pages of<br>information that can save you and/or your direct-marketing<br>clients from financial disaster.
Please pay careful attention. What you are<br>about to read is deceptively simple. In fact, I'm going to<br>have to ask for a bit of patience from some of you. Especially<br>those of you who are "old pros." You see, the first<br>pages of this letter are going to reveal some stuff that most<br>of you already know. Please bear with me. Some of my readers don't<br>know this stuff and besides, it never hurts any of us to take<br>a little "refresher course" once in a while.
And anyway, it's all a "setup" to<br>pave the way for me to explain a financial "life or<br>death" concept that will be revealed near the end of this<br>letter.
Onward. No more messing around. Let's dive<br>right in. Listen: As you may or may not know, every once in a<br>while I give a class on copywriting and/or selling by mail.<br>During these classes, one of the questions I like to ask my<br>students is: "If<br>you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a<br>contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what<br>advantages would you most like to have on your side to help<br>you win?"
The answers vary. Some of the students say<br>they would like to have the advantage of having superior meat<br>from which to make their burgers. Others say they want sesame<br>seed buns. Others mention location. Someone usually wants to<br>be able to offer the lowest prices.
And so on.
Whatever. In any case, after my students are<br>finished telling me what advantages they would most like to<br>have, I usually say to them something like this: "O.K.,<br>I'll give you every single advantage you have asked for. I,<br>myself, only want one advantage and, if you will give it to<br>me, I will (when it comes to selling burgers) whip the pants<br>off all of you!"
"What<br>advantage do you want?" they ask.
"The<br>only advantage I want," I reply...
"Is...
A Starving Crowd!"
Think about it. When it comes to direct<br>marketing, the most profitable habit you can cultivate is the<br>habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people<br>(markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at<br>least hungry) for some particular product or service.
How do you measure this hunger? Well, for us<br>direct marketers, thanks to the mailing list industry, it is<br>rather easy. Let's brainstorm a little. Let's suppose you and<br>I are new to DM and we want to sell a book titled "How<br>to Invest Money In the Stock Market" and we have<br>created a direct mail promotion designed to sell this book.<br>Who do we mail our promotion to? Here are some possibilities:
Possibility<br>#1: We could mail it to people whose names and<br>addresses we get right out of a telephone book.
Comments:<br>This is a terrible idea. Except for offers (like my<br>coat-of-arms promotion) that have an extremely broad<br>appeal, there are far too many non-prospects in this "hodge<br>podge" group of people. In fact, the only thing these<br>people have in common is that they all have a phone. Some of<br>these people won't have any money to invest. Some of them<br>(more than you would ever guess) never purchase anything by<br>mail for the simple reason that they don't know how to read!<br>Some of them can read but they can't read English. Some<br>of them are old enough to remember 1929 and would never think<br>of putting their money into stocks. Some of them are too<br>stupid to invest in stocks. Some are too smart. Some are too<br>paranoid.
And so on.
In short, there is way too much waste<br>circulation in a list made up of names taken from a telephone<br>book. Using a list like this is like shooting with a shotgun<br>instead of a rifle.
Onward.
Possibility<br>#2: We could mail our promotion to people whose names<br>and addresses we get from a phone book, but only to those<br>people who live in high income areas.
Comments:<br>This is a little better, but not nearly good enough. High<br>income areas are, incidentally, easy to identify because<br>several companies have compiled statistics on every zip code<br>in the United States and they can tell you, with great<br>accuracy, the average income per person in each zip code. They<br>(these companies) can also, by the way, tell you the average<br>education level, average age, how much is spent (per capita)<br>on automobiles and a bunch of other stuff.
However, as I said, this still isn't nearly<br>good enough. For one thing, not everybody who lives in a<br>high-income area has a high income. Some of these people might<br>be live-in maids or gardeners or some other type of domestic<br>servant. (Come to think of it, with the prices they charge,<br>California gardeners at least ought to be wealthy!)<br>Some of these people may have money but are not interested in<br>investing. Some of them may buy investment books from a<br>bookstore but never by mail. Some of them may have money they<br>are inclined to invest but will only invest in areas other<br>than the stock market where they already have<br>expertise.
Whatever. Once...