The Clean and Green Club

Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, October, 2008

A lot of marketers think direct-mail–the old-fashioned kind that shows up in your physical mailbox–is the most important tool in their arsenal. But others have been badly burned and are reluctant to try again. Which is understandable, when you think about spending a dollar or more per envelope (postage, printing, professional copywriting, etc.), and only converting about 2 percent.

2 percent is considered a very decent return–but at a dollar each, that means each actual sale costs you $50, not counting the cost of product.

So…when does it make economic sense for you to use postal direct mail? Here are few situations; there are others, of course:

• You’re selling high-ticket items. If you’ve got a $500 product that costs little or nothing to produce (let’s say, an information product), and your cost of sale is $50, you’re doing very well.
• You’re mailing to influencers and decision-makers who control large numbers of orders–for example, wholesalers and distributors who might order thousands, or professors who could order 300 copies of your book for use in their courses
• You know that your lifetime customer value is high enough to more than justify the high cost of that first sale; this new customer will go on to spend thousands of dollars with you over the next few years
• You’ve done some things to bring down the cost and/or increase the return, so your numbers work better (we’ll talk about how to do that next month–if you can’t wait, I recommend ordering a copy of my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart — we’ve got some very nice specials right now)