Selling into businesses via direct mail           

 

 

  1. Who are you selling to

 

This is the first key question – within the companies you are writing to, who are you trying to talk to?   It may seem obvious but it isn't – because some people who you might want to talk to are so busy that they might not read your direct mail.  Sometimes it is better to get the person who is going to use your product or service to take your ideas on board.   That person then goes up the chain and convinces the next in command to spend the money.

 

Thinking about who you are writing to is a vital first step when mailing businesses, because the “who” defines the issue of “how you write”.   You will need to write differently to a chairman from the way you write to a Personnel Director or a Marketing Director.

 

Sometimes some experimentation is a good idea.   Try a small mailshot to several different people and see what happens.  Assess which mailing brings in the ultimate results.

 

Sometimes you have to go through several levels to get any sort of sale – maybe inviting people to a seminar first, or offering a meeting.  Other times you might feel you can go straight in and make the sale.  Sometimes you might mail two people at once – the person who will use the product or service and the person who authorises its purchase.  All these factors influence how you write.

 

What you should absolutely resist at this early stage is any sort of dogma.   Personally I shudder each time someone announces to me that they “know their business” or that they “always go to the top man”.   Apart from the sexist nature of that last comment, most people who express their ideas in this dogmatic style are using dogma to cover their failure to experiment.   The person who tells me that they know what they are doing and they always go to the Marketing Director (or whatever) is the person who quite often ends up getting zero response and then blames me for supplying a duff mailing list.

 

My view is that if you have not experimented with who you send your promotions to within the last two years, you should do such an experiment now.   Your assumptions might just be completely wrong.

 

 

  1. Names or titles

 

The overwhelming majority of people who mail businesses seek to mail people by name.  “Junk mail sent to generic titles doesn’t get through” is the common view.

 

Like all common views this one needs to be challenged – not least because the dominance of this view has warped the way in which marketing is working.

 

To explain this we need to take a step back.

 

Imagine you want to mail a particular senior person in companies with over 20 staff.   There are (in rough figures) about 50,000 such companies in the UK.   However you will probably find that most reputable mailing lists have named people in the job you specify (marketing manager, head of HR, finance director or whatever) for only about one third of these companies.   (Of course the number can be quite a bit higher for the most common job titles, but that in itself leads to another problem, which I will come to in a moment.)

 

So assuming you have got a potential market of 50,000, and you are insistent that you only want to mail those companies where you have a name, you might now be down to 20,000 people.

 

The problem is that it isn't only you that has made this decision just to mail the named people.   I can tell you, based on the enquiries and orders that we get, that about 85% of the firms wanting to mail senior managers and directors in UK companies have made the same decision – they want names.   In other words out of every 100 mail shots sent to the senior marketing person (or whoever) in large companies, 20,000 people get 85 mailshots and 30,000 people (whose names don’t appear on lists) get just 15 mailshots.

 

Let’s assume that you reduce the chance of someone reading a mailshot by 50% by not having a name.   You have still done far better – because the 15,000 you have actually got to don’t get very much direct mail at all.

 

(Actually there is no evidence at all that not putting a name on reduces readership by 50%.  I’m actually not convinced there is any reduction – but if there is one I can’t see how it is anything more than 10% at the very most.)

 

We might pause for a moment to consider why so many marketing managers and directors don’t appear on mailing lists.   This has to do with the way data is gathered.  Most names on mailing lists are researched either by sending the companies questionnaires or by telephoning.   Quite simply there are many companies that have a policy of not replying to such enquiries when it comes to names.   In these cases researchers might turn to company reports, but even here there are many firms that don’t readily publish the names of senior staff.

 

The only other approach widely used is subscriptions to magazines – when you subscribe (or applies for a free copy) you are asked your job title – and then go on the mailing list under that title.  But once again one gets only a limited number of people – the people who subscribe to the magazine.  The majority don’t subscribe – and so don’t get your advertisement.

 

To go much further in the research would increase the cost of the research considerably, and so most people don’t do it.

 

If we now return to the question of the more popular job titles – the chairman, managing director and the like.   These names are more widely known, and so these people get more mail – both because they appear on named mailing lists and because many people who sell believe that they have to come to a top person in a company.

 

This final belief is, in my opinion, just plain daft.   I’m chairman of a modest sized plc.  We’re not by any means huge, but nevertheless it is pointless sending me mail (or come to that phoning me up) about telephone services, the cost of electricity, car rentals, computer networks, warehouse space, new mailing lists and the like.  I don’t deal with these things, and we pay other people in the company to make sure we get value for money in each area.

 

To pull this together, let’s now consider the senior people in companies which don’t give out the names of senior staff other than maybe the MD.   These people can be addressed by title.   These people don’t get that much mail.

 

Overall I think it is worth addressing these unnamed people from time to time.   One way I have found of doing this with some success is to write and offer them something free – a report or something like that – so that you collect the person’s name.  Then you put them on your own database and mail them by name each month.

 

 

  1. Companies by what they do

 

Selecting companies by what they do is a prime way of making a business list selection.   There are around 4500 standard classifications of businesses covering the million or so companies in the UK.   (If you would like a copy of the list of classifications showing also how many there are of each type in the UK, I can email this to you)

 

We do often get requests for “all the businesses in the CB postcode” and I am invariably bemused by this.   What could you possibly sell that is of interest to an engineering company with 1000 staff and a flower shop?  Do you really want to reach “all” companies?

 

 

  1. Companies by where they are

 

Selection on all business lists can be arranged by postcode and by county – and of course you can select in this way as well as by the other factors mentioned here.   However if you are doing an initial trial mailing it is usually best to work by selecting businesses at random across the UK, unless you really only want to sell into one geographic area.

 

 

  1. Companies by size

 

Company size is normally measured by turnover or by number of staff.   Companies can be selected by profit as revealed in Companies’ House reports but this does add a lot to the cost of the list.  Figures are gathered either from Companies’ House reports or from what the company says in answer to questionnaires and surveys.

 

Both categorisations (turnover and number of staff) have problems – although generally speaking they are the best measures of companies that we have.    Turnover can be misleading in that some companies add in turnovers which pass through the company but which have little impact on trading.  Companies are also often far less ready to declare turnover in response to a telephone survey, and so figures are taken from Company House reports, which can be very out of date.   Total number of staff figures tend to be more accurate, and do, in my opinion, give a clearer indication of what is actually going on in a company.  Generally speaking most firms don’t employ people unless they have something to do.

 

There are, as I have mentioned, around one million active businesses in the UK.   This figure excludes operations run by one person part-time.   So they would exclude the sort of business I set up when I started out – I was working as a teacher, and running a mail order business in the evenings from my study at home.   Is that the sort of person you want to mail?  If not, don’t look at mailing lists that claim to have got ever more companies in the UK.

 

Let me stress this point: if someone quotes a higher number of businesses than one million then the only explanations are that they are either including these tiny part-time operations, or they are including registered companies that are not trading.  My company (for example) retains the registration of a couple of limited companies that have not traded at all – but which might do one day.  We rather like the names and don’t want to let them go, so each year we spend a few pounds to retain the name.   Yes they are companies, and yes we occasionally get bits of direct mail for them – but they don’t do anything, they have no staff, no budgets no nothing.

 

 

  1. Excluding the companies you already have

 

Most commercially available mailing lists ought to be able to exclude the companies you already have on your own database.  

 

Let’s imagine you want to buy a list of Consulting Engineers.  There are around 3900 such people in the UK and you already have 500 of them on your database.  You send your database in with the order, and the company that supplies the list will then cut those from the order.  There is normally a charge for this – but it will be far lower than the cost of buying the list again.

 

  1. Who do I sell to?

 

It is quite possible that you may not be quite sure which types of companies are your prime customers.   However it is quite possible to find out who you sell to – in terms of company size, company type, company location etc.  

 

This process is called profiling and involves you sending in a copy of part of your database (500 addresses is usually enough) which we then run against the database of one million companies in the UK.   There is a charge of £200 for this service – but the cost only applies if we find a way of reducing your marketing costs.  For example, if you are mailing all companies with over 20 staff, and we find that you get only 1% of your sales from companies with over 200 staff, but 25% of your marketing budget is going on that, we are giving you a way of cutting your marketing cost by 25% with virtually no loss of profit.   That saving will be far greater than the £200 charged for profiling, and you will make that saving on the very next mailing.

 

But if we don’t find something as exciting as that, there is no charge.

 

 

  1. Now what?

 

You have decided on the companies you want to mail.  You have selected them by size, by location, and by what they do.   Then you think about who you want to mail in each company – you consider the issue of names and/or generic titles.   And now you have to write the advert.

 

At this point most people (in my experience) do one of two things.   They either

 

a)    Take what they did last time, tart it up a bit, and use that advert

b)    Knock out some text quickly, and send it to a designer, asking the firm to “do its stuff”.

 

My view is that this is a false step in both cases.  What you should do is spend a lot of time thinking about the text.  Everything I have learned in direct mail over the last 25 years, from the launch of my part-time mail order business, to the creation of Hamilton House Mailings plc, leads me to believe that there are two things that determine how well your advert works.

 

a)    The product or service

b)    The text

 

Of course there are some products and services that you simply cannot sell no matter what.  And there are a few that just sell and sell no matter how bad the advert.

 

But in between most of us have the job of promoting products and services that will sell a bit.  Our job is to raise that “bit”.   Any old advert for product X might get a 1% response rate.  With the right text that can go up to 2%, 3% or even more.

 

I’ve endlessly told the story (sorry if you have heard it before) about how I wrote a one page advert twice.  Version A was my first attempt.  Version B had two extra sentences at the end.   We sent out each advert to 200 target addresses selected at random.   Version A got no replies.   Version B got a 2% response rate.  This sent us dancing in the streets, because with this promotion we were breaking even at 0.5%.  2% was big time profit.  Had we not tested, and just used Version A the dancing in the streets would have been replaced by brick walls and banging heads.

 

The text does make a difference.  A huge difference.  Much more difference that the design.    Good design helps a bit.  Bad design drops your response a bit.  But design by itself doesn’t make that much difference – it just helps the page look nice.   What makes the sale is the text. 

 

And yet despite this fact people still go out and spend ££££ on design, while knocking out the text themselves on a dull Wednesday afternoon when they are regularly interrupted by phone calls.  

 

Just consider the costs.   A mailing to 5000 potential customers selected from a business mailing list (that is, a list you buy in – we are not talking about your own list of existing customers here) could cost you around £2000 excluding design.    Imagining you get 1% of these people to buy from you straight off – that is 50 sales.   Assuming you make £50 profit per sale your income is £2500 – you are just creeping into profit, unless you have spent a fortune on design.

 

If you asked a professional to write you the text for your letter or brochure it could cost you anything from £200 to £500.   Supposing that letter or brochure text raised your response rate by another 1% you have just got another £2500 profit, for a cost of between £200 to £500.  Added to which you will probably have got the rights to use that letter as much as you like – which means next time you mail out another 5000 companies you are probably going to get 2% sales again – but you don’t even have to pay the extra £200 to £500.

 

Of course designers will tell you different.  They will talk about design, and minimise the importance of text.   You have to decide which of us is right.

 

To help you in your decision here are a few things you can do.

 

*      Read the report on writing good copy.  There is a link at the bottom of this page

 

*      Send me a copy of your current advertising.  I will then phone you back and tell you how I would change it in order to raise response rates.   The call takes about 15 minutes normally.  Most people who go through this process then find they are left with two options – their existing promotion, and my suggestions for a new approach.  They can then do a trial mailing – half the list get the existing promotion, half the list get the new one.   They then measure the results and see if I was talking a load of whatnot, or whether my ideas made sense.

 

In this approach I always restrict myself to changes which add little or no cost to the existing scenario.  For example if you have 100,000 copies of a catalogue in a warehouse I try to avoid saying “bin them and start again”.  Normally in such circumstances I work on the idea of changing (or adding) the covering letter.   If you are doing a two colour 4 side piece, I don’t suggest you go to 32 page full colour.  I try and stay in the budget you have set.

 

This review process is free and without obligation.  Hamilton House offers it because:

 

a)    I enjoy doing it, and I learn a lot from the discussions I have through this process. 

b)    Lots of the companies that go through this process tend to end up thinking that I am quite a nice chap (very gratifying) and they then go on and place their list and mailing orders through Hamilton House.

c)     Some of the people I talk to then ask the creative team at Hamilton House to write for them.   We are very happy to do it – although you won’t be surprised to hear that at this stage we start charging.

 

If you want to send a leaflet in for review you can fax it to me on 01536 399 012.  If faxing please write “To Tony – for review” on the top.  Otherwise the piece will not get to me, but will be treated as if it you are trying to sell us something.

 

Alternatively you can mail it to me (with an appropriate covering note asking me to review the piece) to Tony Attwood, Hamilton House Mailings plc, Earlstrees Ct., Earlstrees Rd., Corby, Northants NN17 4HH

 

You can also email it to me – but please do note that if there are several files, or the files are large I might end up having difficulty printing them or reading them.