What's inside this envelope...? Let me open it...

Subjects: Direct Mailing
Principle: Optimizing the opening rate of Envelopes

I am big on Optimization: if I do something, I love to get maximum yield from it. Especially if the price I have to pay for mediocre results or great results is the same ... "I was not put on this planet to lose money" as my millionaire friend Mike reminds me.

So, when we talk about Direct Marketing (basically, the letters sent to people directly in their regular mail box), we have several critical hurdles to clear (it's like playing a video game: there are obstacles along the way that we must pass in a certain order: if we fail even just one, we lose and our letter is trashed)

The first one is to get the envelope to be looked at: it’ is cute to see how much money businesses waste with direct marketing, creating a fantastic brochure or sales letter and putting it into a completely uninviting envelope. The result is that the envelope (with the content and the stamp) is sent straight to trash. What a great way to burn money...

There are a couple of main strategies to get the envelope looked at:

a) Make it look very personal, to encourage the receiver to consider it of high importance. Tactics in this case require the use of the personal name of the addressee (yeah, there are also letters sent to “"Resident of”": they go straight to trash), personal looking envelope (white, no company logo), return address of a person. The best result is obtained with hand writing: as this is pretty labor intensive, there are now sophisticated programs that can simulate relatively well human writing: this will surely increase the opening rate. Here the stamp should be a regular one, better if unusual, but surely not metered mail

b) Make it very interesting, forcing the receiver to open it out of sheer curiosity. This requires the use of smart headlines (see posting on March 27th). The receiver knows it is for commercial purposes, but the headline is so enticing that he/she cannot avoid opening.

An extra tactic in this case is to put, instead of a 37 Cents stamp, say, 7 stamps of 5 cents and 2 of 1 (5x7+2x1=37c): imagine the recipient, with an envelope with so many stamps, with great headlines on it… How can he/she not open it?

Another tactic is the one depicted in today’s posting: to glue a coin inside the envelope, to elicit even more curiosity: the tactile sense will be stimulated, adding to the curiosity. In this case is a coin: it could have been a plastic card as well, for instance.

As Claude Hopkins says, curiosity is a very strong motivator for people: if we are able to fuel the desire to know more, we are on the right track.

That’s it for today: I got to go throught my mail. There are a couple of envelopes with a bizarre looking content I want to check out...

Kramerilio in USA