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The Direct Mail Solution — Chapter-05: The Message and the Messenger
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65
The Message
and the Messenger
By Dan S. Kennedy
S CRAIG HAS DESCRIBED, A DIRECT-MAIL PIECE OR PACKAGE involves
two big decisions and comprises two big pieces of work: the
message, expressed in copy, graphics, and photos; and the
messenger, which is the format. I’ll give you my perspective on both.
Why Marketing Messages FAIL
If you are in the patio furniture business, you can’t help yourself.
You habitually think about patio furniture, and you assume others
are interested in patio furniture, too. And you are wrong. This is
where failed messages begin, by being product-driven rather than
driven by human interest, real life, and emotion. People buy patio
furniture to sit on only when their current patio furniture is falling
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apart or they’ve moved, have an empty patio, and didn’t bring their old
patio furniture with them. Not enough of these folks in a given area to
support your patio furniture store, let alone everybody else selling the
stuff. You must get people who do not NEED new patio furniture, who
can sit in the patio furniture they’ve got, to (irrationally) WANT new
patio furniture. A message about brand names, vast selection, low price,
easy financing, and free delivery FAILS TO CREATE OR STIMULATE
WANT—it only caters to NEED.
Hardly anybody spends $100,000 remodeling a kitchen because
their current kitchen doesn’t work. They do it out of WANT, not NEED.
Both these examples involve emotion—ego, status, outdoing the
neighbors, pride of ownership. Family life and social life—having a better
environment, making at home experiences more enjoyable, having the
place family and friends want to congregate. Human interest—the story
of the big Fourth of July party or the Thanksgiving gathering with
feasts prepared by three generations in the amazing kitchen. If you
want to see somebody who has mastered this, in the backyard deck and
gazebo business, visit the website of one of our great GKIC Members,
Matt Buchel: tropicallifestyle.com.au.
At the end of this chapter, in Figures 5–1 to 5–4, I’ve reprinted just
a few pages from one booklet, part of a complete, multipiece direct-mail
package sent to leads obtained online, at home shows, and from simpler
lead-generation direct mail. This company is thriving, and selling at
premium prices, because it has built such a comprehensive message.
Look at page 43 of this sales booklet: a human interest story about
a couple getting married in their Tropical Lifestyle gazebo (Figure 5–4).
The front cover positions the sales booklet as a “how to” consumer’s
guide and features a lifestyle photo of a happy family. Pages 15 and 24
focus on real-life reasons why specific types of customers might want
a gazebo and deck (Figures 5–2 and 5–3). In total, this is a 52-page
sales piece, loaded with really great sales copy, with a good balance
between product information and the more persuasive copy to make
people WANT a whole new, “tropical lifestyle” backyard. (All this is
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so successful, by the way, that a few years back, Matt won the coveted
GKIC Marketer of the Year Award, and now has a package of all his
marketing that he licenses to other contractors throughout the world,
and a samples package that business owners in many different areas buy
from him as well.)
Matt has mastered the making of messages about real life, customer
emotions, and human interest.
Unless and until you understand this, and translate and apply it to
your business, you will forever fail at assembling interesting, persuasive,
and productive messages.
Direct mail fails, or at least disappoints for four reasons:
- Poorly chosen list (Chapter 6 will cover this topic.)
- An uninteresting, boring message that fails to motivate WANT
- A message poorly matched with the list
- A messenger that can’t get the message across Two of these four failure factors revolve around the message. This is why it’s so critically important to craft a message worthy of investment. There are a number of possible ways to get to a worthy message. You can and should assemble “raw material.” That may be past advertising that has worked, competitors’ advertising, transcripts of recordings of you or your best salespeople talking on the phone or face to face with prospects, a focus group or interviews with customers, or testimonials from customers. Research what exceptionally successful operators of your type of business are doing in other parts of the country. You ought not focus just on those in your own field—some of the best breakthrough ideas come from great marketing and great messages outside your field. To that end, you should tap into GKIC, a network and clearinghouse of great marketing, with a plethora of resources, meetings and conferences, and assistance, starting with a free test-drive opportunity. As a GKIC Member you’re introduced to thousands of people in diverse businesses who are every bit as successful
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at this kind of marketing as Matt Buchel, who’s work I’ve shown off
here. Every month, in the No B.S. Marketing Letter, you see amazing
examples of great marketing. Check in at www.dankennedy.com/
DirectMailSolution, Craig’s GKIC affiliate site.
If you are going to write your sales copy yourself, you need three
things: structure, inspiring samples to lead your thinking, and all of
the raw material that I just mentioned. Giving you a crash course in
direct-response copywriting here is way beyond this book’s purpose, so
instead, I’ll recommend the best basic shortcut resources I can. One is
mine, a book, The Ultimate Sales Letter (4th Edition); plus The Architecture
of Persuasion by Michael Masterson; How to Create Irresistible Offers by
Robert Bly; and Great Leads: Six Easiest Ways to Start Any Sales Message by
Masterson and Forde. These books will give you structure for your copy.
A skeleton to hang your flesh on.
In addition, many specific tools are available, like fill-in-the-blank
headlines. Million Dollar Mailings by Denny Hatch and The Greatest Sales
Letters by Hodgson are, in large part, giant inspiration files, with actual
samples of extremely successful sales letters for various companies,
products, and purposes. Last, there are “cheat sheets”: two advertising
thesauruses, Words That Sell and More Words That Sell by Richard Bayan.
For many purposes, this will be enough. If you want to go further, both
basic and advanced online and home-study courses on copywriting are
available from two sources: GKIC, at www.DanKennedy.com/store, and
from AWAI, American Writers and Artists, at www.AWAIonline.com.
If you are going to write by committee—involving your spouse,
business partner, and key employees—do yourself a huge favor and
get the book Copy Logic: The New Science of Producing Breakthrough Copy
(Without Criticism) by Michael Masterson and Mike Palmer.
If you are going to hire a copywriter or copywriters, or a copywriting
coach to critique your work, I suggest working through AWAIonline.
com. It maintains directories of freelance copywriters and has an
assignments board where you can post your needs and invite interested,
appropriate copywriters to connect with you, provide samples of work,
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and even audition. If you are working with Craig Simpson, he can
also direct you to appropriate copywriters. If you have a project of
significant size and scope, I occasionally accept new copywriting clients
myself—but I am at the top of the compensation range; we begin with a
day of diagnostic and strategy consulting (as of this writing, my base fee
for that day is $18,800); multimedia, multistep campaigns frequently
involve fees from $50,000 to $150,000 and beyond, plus royalties,
usually linked to resulting gross revenues.
If you are going to use outside copywriters, you still need to
assemble good raw material for them, and it is still useful to be familiar
with what they are doing and why they are doing it the way that they
are—so I still recommend reading the above-listed books.
My final message recommendation is: Don’t be Amish. Most
businesspeople study only—only!—what their direct competitors and
peers do. Everybody in a circle looking at each other. But great
messages that work with direct mail tend to be direct-response messages,
not traditional retail or service messages, so you need to observe and
learn from direct-response marketers. Find relevant direct-marketing
companies to watch and borrow ideas from. If you have a local butcher
shop, pay attention to how Omaha Steaks sells steaks by mail order,
direct mail, and online; don’t pay attention to the other butcher shop
across town. If you have an upscale menswear store, pay attention to
the Charles Thywritt Company, to J. Peterman Co., and to other direct
marketers in the category. If you are a dermatologist, look at how my
client, Guthy-Renker, advertises its acne remedy, Proactiv®.
What Messenger to Entrust Your Message To
Message can govern formats, or formats can govern message. But one
thing is definite: the format of your direct-mail piece or package should
be carefully chosen, and its appearance should be congruent with
its purpose—which often means less than aesthetic, artistically pure
designs.
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My friend and client, Jerry Jones, who has probably put more
patients in dentists’ chairs all over the world with his direct mail than
anybody, living or dead, ever, often has trouble with his doctor-clients
who want to use postcards with beautiful photos, logos, and very little
copy, to look “professional.” One of his consistently best-performing
postcards is black typewriter-looking type on an ugly green 3- × 5-inch
postcard. This is why we always test multiple “looks” and formats.
Ugly or pretty, plain or fancy, in an envelope or self-mailer, big or
small—well, it all depends.
The most important thing to know is: The format’s jobs are: 1)
to get delivered, 2) to get opened or looked at, and 3) to facilitate
the sales copy, the message creating interest and persuading the
reader to take a clear next step. Don’t add any other directives or
responsibilities to that list—like pleasing you, your spouse, your staff, or
your graphic artist, or making a brand statement, or winning awards, or
being funny or clever. Any or all of those other things may or may not
happen in the course of achieving the three essential goals, but none
of these other things can direct the content or appearance or format of
your direct-mail piece.
The second most important thing to do is to be reasonable. Do
not underestimate the difficulty of achieving these three goals. A simple
postcard with a coupon on it may be able to achieve these goals if it’s
going to homes with customers who know your business and regularly
or seasonally buy what you sell—say, pizza or snow tires. But a simple
postcard simply cannot be reasonably expected to survive a mailroom
and a gatekeeper, to reach and interest a corporate CEO. What you are
doing with direct mail is buying interest and response, and you have
to understand that there is variable cost in getting different kinds of
people’s interest. The desire for unearned success is a rising plague on
American society, adversely affecting us in a myriad of ways—including
business owners’ irrational disappointment with direct mail when
formats wholly inappropriate for its task and its audience are used and
too-cheap investments are made.
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Incidentally, direct mail doesn’t just mean mail. I’ve had and have
many clients who use Federal Express, UPS, and the USPS’ Priority
Mail as delivery means for marketing messages. Nor does it just refer
to printed matter. We send audio CDs, video DVDs, DVDs in players
inside attaché cases, messages inscribed on or fastened to basketballs
and coconuts and canoe paddles, and every other imaginable object.
The value of the response tells us what we can spend, establishing what
I call the Maximum Allowable Investment; we then engineer the most
impactful campaign within that number. For a look at a wide variety of
odd, unusual “object mail,” visit www.3DMailResults.com.
On the other hand, sometimes simple is best. The late, great
copywriter Gary Halbert was a staunch advocate of a simple, hand-
addressed, live postage stamp-adorned envelope, with no business
identity, no logos, and no teaser copy. Pure “sneak-up mail,” appearing
to be personal, from one individual to another.
Much of the time, my clients are doing multistep mailings, so there
is the opportunity to use several different formats within the campaign.
Ultimately, you must think of your format as a real messenger.
You are asking him to go to your prospect’s home or office, knock on
the door, and present himself—when he will either be invited in to tell
his story or have the door rudely slammed in his face, denying him any
opportunity. How will you dress and outfit and enable your messenger?
My friend Sally Hogshead, author of the excellent book, Fascinate, has
documented well that the average initial attention span to anything
new is now down to the attention span of a goldfish: nine seconds. Keep
that in mind.
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FIGURE 5–1 The cover of Matt Buchel’s 52-page Tropical
Lifestyle sales booklet.
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FIGURE 5–2 Page 15 of Matt Buchel’s Tropical Lifestyle
sales booklet.
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FIGURE 5–3 Page 24 of Matt Buchel’s 52-page Tropical
Lifestyle sales booklet.
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FIGURE 5–4 Page 43 of Matt Buchel’s 52-page Tropical
Lifestyle sales booklet.
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