The Return of Direct Mail: How this ‘Old School’ Tactic Can Land High Paying Clients

Source: Neil Patel

The average email open rate is 24% industry-wide.

That’s not horrible, but it’s also not great.

And that’s just the open rate. Not the click-through rate.

You’d be lucky to generate a CTR higher than just a few measly percentage points based on that.

Because only a tiny portion of that 24% is actually clicking on your content after opening.

Meanwhile, direct mail open rates are nearly double at 42%.

Why? Because we get less direct mail than email, and because we’re sick of the standard junk that floods our inboxes daily.

The point is that nearly half of your target audience would open your direct mail, whereas less than a quarter of them will open your emails.

Best of all, this old-school marketing tactic can still work in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Here’s how to land high-paying clients with direct mail and avoid those low open rates on your email campaigns.

Start by prospecting for your mailing list

The first and most obvious step in running a direct-mail campaign is to build your mailing list.

Obviously, there are some spam restrictions when building an email list. Those, fortunately, don’t exist for offline mail.

Here I’ll teach you how to identify prospects through various channels to build a mailing list that actually works.

First, use your regular site visitors to identify valuable traffic and potential leads.

The trick is to identify prospects ahead of time.

That’s different from your standard email marketing blast. Typically, you get as many people on this list as possible.

Only afterward do you filter them out to qualify them.

The opposite is true with direct mail.

In this case, you qualify them up-front so you only add quality targets to your list.

Narrowing down your prospects ahead of time allows you to send more personalized direct mail that will drive conversions.

When done correctly, you can deliver huge results.

But, don’t just take my word for it:

Optimizely took a similar approach and used dynamic text replacement to constantly change the messaging on its home page based on its campaign audiences.

The result? An impressive 117% increase in visitors who decided to start their service and create an account.

These site visitors are primed and ready to convert. They just need a little push.

Similarly, KlientBoost takes on the strategy of messaging visitors based on how many times they’ve visited the site and what pages they’ve shown interest in.

The trick is to use personalization techniques like this to cut through all the other spammy noise out there.

Now, you clearly know that these leads and prospects are warming up to your brand.

You can use classic on-site tactics like messaging or forms to drive new leads. Or you can identify target accounts that you’d like to go work with one day.

A few minutes of Googling can help you find these potential clients’ contact information using specific queries like this:

If that doesn’t work, you can try a tool like VoilaNorbert and simply enter their name and company.

This tool can also help you collect addresses to save steps when building your address list.

And if none of that works, you can hop over to LinkedIn.

How to build a prospecting list with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the best choice for finding B2B executives who’re difficult to reach.

That also makes it the perfect place to start prospecting for your direct-mail outreach list.

First, head over to LinkedIn.

Then, type a search based on the typical customer segment you need.

For example: “customer relations manager.”

Next, filter the results by people:

Use the filter to refine the results and weed out the unqualified prospects.

To do this, start with industry segmentation and demographics.

For example, if you are targeting customer relations managers, you can select the appropriate industry.

You can also use these filters for company size or the number of employees, depending on how expensive your product might be.

Shoot for a list of around fifty people to start with.

That will give you a large enough batch to see some real results. But it will be small enough that you can still personalize your approach. (More on that later.)

Once you’ve narrowed down your list using filters, set up a search alert to get consistent updates with new people to add to your list.

Linkedin’s Sales Navigator is a perfect place to flesh out this prospecting list.

You can find and save new leads to an ongoing list, like so:

Now you can track all sorts of data about them. For example, you’ll get notifications if they update their websites or start posting new content.

You can also head over to their company websites or LinkedIn company pages to get their physical addresses.

Now, simply add that email address to your spreadsheet and note the contact’s name.

Disqualify prospects using BuiltWith and Ghostery

This process is a little unique in that you want to disqualify people first.

Direct-mail campaigns aren’t cheap.

Each piece is going to set you back a few bucks in postage and boxes. These campaigns are also labor-intensive.

You might be able to find hundreds, if not thousands, of potential prospects on LinkedIn. But most of us just can’t manage to send everyone something in the mail.

Let’s say you want to sell them marketing services.

The first place to start is to check if they’re already spending money on marketing services.

Here’s what I mean.

Pull up BuiltWith to see what scripts are on someone’s website.

For example, I’ll drop my domain name into the URL field and hit “Lookup.”

Next, you can look through the “Technology Profile” of the site to see what they use and what they don’t.

If you see high-end software like Crazy Egg, Unbounce and HubSpot, you instantly know they’re a good fit.

Why would this be a good sign?

It means two things:

1. These people are smart. They’re sophisticated marketers that understand how your marketing services or programs might be different from someone on Fiverr.
2. And it means they’re used to spending serious money to get more customers.

If these prospective companies are already spending thousands of dollars a month on specialized, industry-leading software, they’re more likely to consider spending money on yours as well.

Another way to disqualify leads is by…

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