Why I Stopped Throwing Out Junk Mail
byrnehobart.com
byrnehobart.com
Google no longer has to be pissed at me for using their service without paying and never clicking any links.
Ask yourself this: Where would Tim (4-hour Workweek) Ferriss be without killer copy? He even tested to find the title for his book.
Do you have a source for that assertion? I know of loans and mortgages making $100+ per score, but not per click.
As noted in some of the other comments, these folks test everything, right down to the color of the envelope and the size of the signature at the bottom of the letter. It's also fascinating to read war stories. IIRC, there's a direct mail letter for Reader's Digest (or some similar publication) that was most effective for decades. They kept testing it against other contenders, but that same letter kept getting results.
i disagree with the premise that years and years and billions of dollars have been spent, so it must be the best way. times are changing, people are changing. i've been trained to throw away every piece of junk mail, and so have most of my friends. junk mail is being actively read by a shrinking demographic. just because something has worked does not mean it will continue to do so, or that the statistics are representative. it might not be a good plan to hitch your line to a sinking ship.
i agree in the sense that there are some effective design patterns with respect to effective copywriting, and that some people are forgoing them for something else, perhaps something more aesthetically pleasing when aesthetics don't necessarily get the job done.
That way lies cargo cult capitalism.
I think the point was to re-purpose the techniques from direct-mail advertising to match the next generation of direct response marketing (like emails and sales landing pages). Use the tools from the mailers in your emails or sales pages instead. You can't really 'throw away' a sales landing page the same way you would an unsolicited credit card offer, especially since you navigated to it in the first place.
1. You should learn from others' mistakes because it's cheaper than learning from your own. (approximation of a famous quote)
2. You should learn from other's successes, because it's cheaper than discovering what works by yourself. (simple variation)
3. Applying mutuality principle: how can we mutually benefit from our mistakes?
4. Why not conduct A/B testing and ad word campaigns together so that lessons learned can benefit the maximum number?
5. How to do this?
a) The easiest way is just to blog about your own findings and read others' blogs. This suffers from the free-rider problem: you end up doing research for others.
b) Another alternative is to form a club where each member spends a certain amount per month on ads, and they share their results.
c) Another way is to simply do a lot of Google searches (automatically?) and see what ads are displayed. You're letting Google and the free market do your work for you. This is the e-version of collecting junk mail. You're not being a free rider in this case because your results are being used by others too.
I think a good version of 'long copy' is something like this: http://highrisehq.com where a lot of info is packed on a single page, and it's very far from "junk mail" copy.
FWIW, I found the article refreshingly unique and "outside the box".
Your call for papers probably shouldn't end with "Operators are standing by!" but it wouldn't hurt to establish urgency some other way. ("If your paper is ready, submit it now--although the deadline is in X weeks, we'll only be able to thoroughly review papers we get in the next Y weeks.")
http://www.infomarketingblog.com/direct-response-vs-general-...
Maybe the question is not "which technique works best," but "which technique works best on my target audience."
Are people more or less credulous on the web? I dunno, that has to depend on the category. In some ways, it's harder to avoid reading the copy -- but for experienced users there is a degree of resentment when you realize you've been "SEO"ed by an interesting sounding google link into a page of marketing bullshit.
(And direct marketing companies eat their own dogfood, too. Ogilvy & Mather sent sales letters to lots of Fortune 500 executives, in order to get them to pay O&M to send similar letters to other people. It's a great way to bootstrap your own sales pitch: if your pitch is persuasive, it deserves to be.)
That being said, its important to know why the junk mail is presented like it is, it may not always work for your users.
Junk mailers pay real hard currency for every letter they send, so they've can't afford to use ineffective copy. Online, there is no cost to to sending an email, publishing a blog post, etc., so it's more difficult to determine what copy actually works.
Only if you're not paying for the servers or the copy-writers, etc.
"so it's more difficult to determine what copy actually works."
That doesn't follow. Any sort of tracking, A/B testing, etc. that you could do with junk mail, you can do with spam or more accepted email marketing - and probably more cheaply.
They may well continue to make money regardless, or for some other reason than the money they spend on direct marketing (or on online advertising, for that matter).
What we need are some serious studies published in peer reviewed journals that prove that direct marketing works, not claims that if it didn't work businesses wouldn't spend money on it.
Display Advertising PPC Advertising TV Advertising Radio Advertising Trade Shows In-Mall Kiosks etc.
Also, how would you do the study anyway? Some people do this effectively and others do not. Certain types of advertising are better for reaching some customers and others are not. It seems you are assuming that in the general case direct mail does not work at all and people are using it just because they haven't measured their marketing ROI for that channel. With minimal research you could see that this is false.
So far all I've seen are claims (mostly by direct marketers themselves), not any kind of reliable proof.
As for how the studies would be done, I have no doubt that scientists (who are very clever at coming up with innovative research protocols) could figure something out.
But here is a modest proposal: track the spending habits of a reasonably large, randomized group of people (should be easy enough to do these days), along with the ads they receive. See how many of the products are bought by people who receive and read direct mail ads vs those that don't. That should be a good start.
One could argue that it must be effective, as it's expensive to print and post mail, yet marketers have been doing it for decades. Its results are also generally more measurable than those of mass market advertising.
> You have no other means to reach your customer
On the contrary, (addressed) direct mail is generally sent to as targeted a market as possible. If you know your market, you're generally better off putting a lot of resources into a well-qualified set of prospects, than taking a more "shotgun" approach.
After all this, a particular company will know exactly the demographic that buys, exactly the headline that grabs attention, the copy that gets people to keep turning the page, the post-script message that increases conversions, etc.
This kind of marketing has been perfected, as the author says. A good direct-mail marketer will get a conversion rate of 5%-10%. There are some books you can read to get at specific numbers of different campaigns... This is one of them http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Everything-You-Can-Youve/dp/03....
It would be nice to see some studies in credible peer-reviewed journals about the efficacy of direct marketing at getting consumers to buy their products.
Though, from the quantity of junk mail that I've received, I personally have no doubt as to the efficacy of direct marketers at getting businesses to hire them. But that's a different thing from being effective at getting consumers to buy whatever it is they're selling.
It's perfectly fine to disagree, but to request a peer-reviewed journal about the efficacy of A/B testing? I don't know, maybe something like that exists, but my hunch is that the only things that get peer-reviewed are new ideas that are unproven and require the tough scrutiny of other smart people who are intimiately familiar with the subject matter.
Regarding A/B testing, go try it. Write down 10 different ways to ask out a girl. Go and ask out 10 girls with the first method, 10 with the next, and on down the line measuring the effectiveness of each approach.
You'll figure it out. :-)
Anyway, I'm not questioning the effectiveness of "A/B testing". I'm questioning the effectiveness of direct marketing. Two very different things.
Here are statistics that show that people respond to direct mail. This data is old (2003) but it's quite comprehensive.
How about something published in a respectable peer-reviewed journal?
Certain things are bulk mailed to an extremely large group of people, but this isn't always true. Targeting also does not have to be nonexistent. For example, you could go buy this list at ListSource (http://www.listsource.com/) for about $50:
All the people that live in the Bay Area that live in and own a 3 bedroom condo in a building that has more than 20 units that cost above $500,000 and was refinanced in the last 3 years.
You just can't get that with online targeting, and sometimes when search volume is low or CPCs are high this method becomes much more effective than online advertising.
In fact, it looks like the course is still running - and even taught by the same instructor I had (John Friesen). If you're in the Vancouver area, I'd recommend it: http://www.sfu.ca/wp/dmc.htm
The mail he valued most was the stuff he'd get repeatedly, year after year, month after month - since presumably it performed the best. If he only saw one example of something, he figured it was a test that didn't pull well.
I use the WH Method for my choices on fashion (when I bother to care about fashion): I pick a celebrity who looks rather well put together and similar to me in build, reason that celebrities are required to spend an inordinate amount of attention on fashion in order to maintain their marketability, and then wear/style however they do. It works out rather well.
I've also used the WH Method for doing basic site design in a documentation-happy environment. "Look, every other site with a similar purpose outside your market does their site design like this. You should have those elements as well, or users will be confused."
Agreed