So let’s talk about some types of direct mail that you might want to consider using to market your handyman business. Newsletter, we want to definitely emphasize that. The thing that we’ve talked about a lot today is putting out your newsletter, and we definitely do that using direct mail. Another thing is postcards. The small post cards I mentioned from the U.S. Postal Service, like I told you, it’s low-end, about $.30 in order to get those mailed out. You can also do bigger postcards, including oversized postcards, to get your message out that way too. I’ve used those as well.
Cooperative mailings, we’ve talked a little bit about the free flyer method. Well one of the ways to get that flyer out is to use direct mail. So you find three other business owners, you get them all to come together, put all their marketing pieces on your one share piece, each getting one-fourth of it. And they’re paying a third of the printing costs and a third of the mailing costs in order to get that out, it becomes free for you. So that’s cooperative mailing. Another example of cooperative mailing is like those “Val-packs” or money mailers or things of that nature, where you’ve got a box of coupons, 50, 100, all those different things on there. And you can go ahead and use those things in order to get those mailings out. I have not had good luck with those, some businesses do, you could definitely test them and see. But I’d be more tempted to do direct mail to my own list than I would to use cooperative mailings in order to do that. So you could go ahead and do a test with that, so definitely something to consider.
Another things is flyers would be another type of direct mail. You could use a flyer in order to get that out and instead of doing door-to-door delivery, you could use direct mail. You could have it be a single fold-over or a tri-fold and get those done, and that would be a great additional way to do direct mail.
Here’s another type of direct mail and that is letters. So you could use handwritten letters, and I can go through an entire strategy on how to use a handwritten yellow letter that looks like it’s on a legal pad. It’s highly effective, one of the most responsive marketing pieces I’ve ever done for using direct mail. But you can also regular letters. You could use a letter just relaying social information or information of a personal nature, as a reminder of business, and of course a call to action at the end. But you can also letters as, like we’re going to talk about here, an event invitation. You can write a letter inviting people to a holiday party or a barbeque, or some type of volunteer or charitable event. So you could do that.
I will take just a moment here to talk about this handwritten yellow letter, and share with you how you could use this in your own business. So first I’ll explain exactly what it is and briefly how to do it, and then I’ll give you one or two ideas on how you may be able to implement it. One of the most effective direct mail marketing campaigns we’ve ever done were handwritten yellow letters. And they were not all handwritten, but I’ll tell you how they were made. So imagine a yellow legal pad, and you rip out a sheet of paper and then on that you hand-write out a message in script to somebody about a particular product or service. And so we would actually do this. We would take out a white sheet of paper, put the yellow legal paper behind it so that you could see the lines through your white piece of paper. Then on the white piece of paper, you write out your message, but you leave up some key blank pieces of information. So you do “Dear” and then you leave a blank space. And when we were doing these, we where actually using them on a real state investing business. And we were targeting a very select group of houses that we were interested in buying. And so the message was something like, “I’m interested in buying your property located at,” and then you’d leave a blank spot to fill it in later, “if you’re interested in selling you’re property, please give me a call at blah blah blah,” and you have the entire message written out on a white sheet of paper that would match up to the lines if you photocopied that white sheet of paper onto the yellow sheet of paper. Then we’d take the white sheet of paper with the original and we would photocopy off 100 copies onto the yellow legal pad, so that it looked like it was printed right onto the yellow legal pad in our own handwriting. Then we would go through and one by one, hand-write in just the name of the person and the address of the person. So it looked like it was a personal letter on yellow paper, in our own handwriting, with their mail merge name and address, so you’re only writing the name and address on each one. Fold that up and put it into a hand-addressed envelope with a live stamp and with some cheesy address label. And that actually got an extremely high response for us.
Now could you go and do that instead of doing flyers to a particular neighborhood, on houses that you think would have a good basements to finish, or are particularly good candidates for a particular project? Sure. You can go do a hand-addressed, handwritten yellow letter out to those guys, talking about the projects of what you do, and that your team has done several on the area, or whatever is true for you, and then send those out. They tend to get a much higher response than something that’s typed and looks mass produced. So, just something to consider when you’re looking at direct mail.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about choosing the right direct mail strategy to boost your handyman business clients? Take a look at “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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Now I’ll talk about direct mail for your handyman business. Direct mail is anything you put into the U.S. Postal Service in order to have delivered door to door. It is almost always going to be – well I shouldn’t say that. It is a lot of times going to be one-step marketing to get your message out completely in the direct mail piece. There are some exceptions. For example postcards, postcards are very cost-effective to send out and they are usually two-step marketing, where you have a telephone number and or a website on there where they can get additional information.
How to get it done? I am a huge advocate of either using the U.S. Postal service, click-to-mail where you upload your mailing list, you upload your marketing piece, they’ll do all the printing, they’ll do all the addressing if you want to do mail merge, which is putting the name and address or name and some other piece of data into the mailing piece where it reads like, “Hi Joey, I’ve noticed that you have a house at 1234 Main Street. If you’re interested in having us do repairs on it, let me know.” You can actually do those with the click-to-mail service. They’ll do full mail merge with that, so you can actually use the U.S. Postal Service to get it done. You can also use a mailing house to get it done. I personally tend to use the click-to-mail service, I’m very comfortable with it, it’s very easy for me to use, it’s very cost-effective. But if you’re not comfortable doing that yourself, mailing house is probably next step, have it done for you. I’m not a big fan of having you do direct mail yourself. I don’t think that most business owners have the patience to do it consistently enough, where it’s going to be effective. You’re going to want to have someone else do it, or have it easily done, so that you’re not licking stamps, folding envelopes and all that other stuff which can really drag on you. I’ve done it enough times to know you don’t want to do it.
Cost to get it done – relatively cheap to do it through click-to-mail, of course you want to get a quote through your mailing house. There’s so many variables, but I will tell you that the low end of post card stuff that you’re looking to do, you’re probably looking at around $.33 per post card to get out. And that would include printing on the post card, the postage on the post card and everything to get it in the mail. The only thing it wouldn’t include which you have already would be your mailing list cost. But since you’re usually going to be mailing to your in-house list, then that would already be paid for by you when you did your marketing in order to get the name to begin with. If you were going to do a saturation mailing where you’re mailing to an entire neighborhood, you may have to pay some money in order to get that list, and you’d do some mailing list broker in order to get that. Names usually run about $.05 to $.10 each for most mailing lists unless you can highly specific, using lots of selects.
Scalability – there are few things that are as scalable as direct mail. So it’s highly scalable, it’s also very fast. You put it in the mail, six or seven days later it hits the mail, you get some new business from it, so you can take the profits you made from that business and do another mailing. So it’s really, really quick. Very quick turn-around time if you’re using direct mail. It’s also very effective, it’s becoming more effective even, because fewer people are using direct mail. People are moving to the internet because they don’t realize the power of direct mail. And so there’s an opportunity for you to be one of the few people still using direct mail effectively. I think it’s highly effective, like I told you before, that some people say it’s 20 times more effective than email. I’m not sure if it’s that high, but I do believe it’s significantly higher than email as far as effectiveness goes.
Concerns and other things to be aware of – not much like I think of. Direct mail is great and you can pretty much mail anyone. There’s not a do-not-mail list or anything like that. So it’s a really good resource for getting your information and doing sales. The U.S. Postal Service is one of the greatest salespeople in the world. For a very small fee, they’ll deliver a six-page sales letter for less than $.70 including all the printing and everything. So you can really cost-effectively get your entire marketing message out to people. When you compare it to what it cost have another salesperson doing that same job, it is very cost-effective.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about the best direct marketing strategies to make your handyman business successful? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: On the next topic we can’t end this without talking about newsletters. Share with the listeners your take on newsletters particularly the postal versus the email aspect and what the purpose of the newsletter is, frequency, and content.
James: Okay.
Jassen: It’s actually a lot.
James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, remember that list. Okay, so, so basically newsletters are ways for you to consistently keep in touch with your client base and a trick question for you, Jassen. How often do you send out a monthly newsletter?
Jassen: Monthly?
James: You know, you’d be surprised at how many people get that question wrong by their actions. I mean, most people know the answer when asked, but I know a lot of people that have a monthly newsletter that I get maybe a couple times a year.
Jassen: I understand.
James: So, if you’re going to do a monthly newsletter realize it’s easy to do guys. All you do is to outsource the writing of the articles and you can do all the articles for the year in advance, go hire someone to write twelve articles, and lets say it costs you $5 dollars an article, so it’ll cost you $60… go ahead and have them format it in Microsoft Word or you’ve got like the headline for your newsletter a couple of little sections for you to write, things about things going on in your business and then all you need to do is take your mailing list, upload it to the U.S. postal service website, they’ve got a site called Click2Mail and once they get on Click2Mail they upload their mailing list to that, they upload that Word document and they can send out, they’ll do all the printing, all the postage, all the addressing and you just put in your credit card number. They will do all of it for you and it is dirt cheap.
It is cheaper than you doing it yourself, trust me. They give you a discount for first class mail because they’re going to do their pre-sort standard whatever it is they do to get the lowest possible rate and their printing is extremely reasonable on par with going to your copy shop and getting it copied yourself. So, go ahead and upload it and by the way, do you need a full color high fancy graphic oriented type of newsletter?
Jassen: No, you’re better off if you don’t.
James: Yeah, actually there is statistical studies’ showing that higher cost newsletters are more effective if they’re black and white on paper, no fancy graphics text.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, you’re not trying to become newspaper, a magazine, you’re trying to become a newsletter where you’re just giving out really good information to people almost as if it’s a black and white letter that happens to be to you going out to your group of people and sharing that.
Jassen: Exactly. I recently, like literally for the past few days found out that the Gary Halbert letter… Gary Halbert is a copywriter and marketing expert and he published a newsletter a least a decade if not two through the seventies and eighties I believe and he charged somewhere around $200 a year for it initially and it went up from there and it was usually a three or four page, typed out on a typewriter and copied, you know, letters stuffed in an envelope that people paid for. You know, black and white, nothing special, I’ve seen some PDF copies of some of the old ones, it looked terrible. You know, in terms of a quality production piece it looked terrible. But, people, you know, back in the seventies were paying $200 dollars a year for that because it contained incredibly valuable marketing information for helping people build their business and so the presentation didn’t matter nearly as much as the content did.
James: Right, and you can go, if you really want to go high end and do and do a high end graphics and things of that nature, it doesn’t cost that much more, but I’m telling you, you need to get it out monthly and if what that takes is you putting out a black and white plain newsletter with one article, two articles or something like that a couple of little boxes for resources, calls to action in there saying ‘call me if you have a house to buy or sell’ or whatever your message is for that particular group then if that what it takes to do it make sure you get it done and you can get that all ready to go and upload, upload the letter it will get all done for you and it’s really inexpensive to do, so.
Jassen: Right. Well, you know that reminds… Do you remember the flyers that first round of flyers that I put together when we were at our brokers together and you know, I had the resource boxes on the back for, you know, like a mortgage broker…
James: Sure.
Jassen: … insurance guy, home inspector and I mean they were, I slapped them together, you know, for a listing, I think each one probably took me no more than ten or fifteen minutes to put together. It was just a Word document, they were black and white. They were not pretty by any stretch of the imagination. We got calls off those. I mean, it was just incredible.
James: You act surprised. Well, you don’t need to do anything fancy, guys. All you need to do is give great value. So, it’s not a matter of, you know, how expensive the graphics were to put together, they’re not rating you on that. In some ways if you don’t do it well and you go for that then you’re going to come across worse than if you try to just do a plain black and white one and just get the information out and they realize it’s the information that’s of value, not the graphics.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
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The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: Right and the Joint Venture For Profit download really worth listening to if you’d be interested in doing that sort of thing. So, the next item here on the outline is you’ve talked at length about this whole know, like and trust concept which is very, very important for building business relationships because people do business with people they know, like and trust it’s almost become a kind of a mantra within the business world now kind of like total quality management used to be a decade ago you know things like that but the thing is the core of business it really is true you are only going to do business with somebody that you have some sort of rapport with or some sort of a relationship. Can you go into some things real quick again about how to manage that relationship and use it to build repeat and referral business for our listeners?
James: I definitely will and I want to point out something that just occurred to me while you were saying that and it was this idea of how do you build a quality relationship with somebody and what occurred to me was a lot of people go I want to go spend quality time with my kids so I’m going to go spend an hour with my kids because I don’t see them a lot to try to do that and it’s kind of a misconception because really where quality comes from is quantity, you need to spend a certain amount of time, you need to have face time you need to be exposed to somebody a repeated number of times before that guard comes down and you get an overall impression you know where someone says “yeah, I know him and I met him 5 years ago and he emails me every single month, really nice guy, sends testimonials out and lots of people like his work” and that’s very different then trying to get to that level in one meeting so you can’t go in -and some people argue with me and say “Yeah, I can develop a really strong relationship in 15 minutes” yeah ok – but you’re going to end up developing a much stronger relationship with lots of repeated contact and if you can develop those strong relationships in short periods of time combine long periods of repeated exposure with those really high quality meeting face to face time where you combine both of those together and so some ways to do that number one is you have to have a monthly newsletter and I strongly recommend that you guys mail it, I think I talked about this earlier but get it in the direct mail-
Jassen: Several times.
James: Yeah, put it in the mail you’re going to be tempted to save the $50.00 or whatever it’s going to cost you in order to send out the physical mailing don’t do it, put it in the mail.
Jassen: Or, you can have someone else do it.
James: Yeah, the US postal service has a service where you can upload your mailing list, you can upload your newsletter and print it in Word, Microsoft Word and upload it and they will actually do the printing for you, they’ll do the postage, they’ll give you a discounted rate for the postage and they’ll get it off for you in the mail as a mail merge and so they’ll put “Dear John, here’s a newsletter for the month” and have like a couple articles some testimonials and maybe some pictures of jobs you’ve done and they’ll do all the printing and all the mailing for you and it’s dirt cheap so go ahead and use those guys if you don’t have one in mind or hire someone to do it, outsource it or have a high school kid help you with it. Second thing is occasional emails with updates, promotional offers, special reports and important announcements if you go out and you’ve created a special report great go ahead and send an email out to your list “Hey, I wanted to make sure that you guys all got this already since you’re already on my list here’s a special report on “15 things you need to know about remodeling your kitchen, if anyone is thinking about remodeling their kitchen, I do have space available next month to do a remodel call me and we’ll coordinate it and if you know of someone that’s thinking about remodeling their kitchen I would really appreciate it if you referred me to them just give me their number or give them my number or both and I’d be happy to send you guys out for a nice dinner on me if they end up doing the job with me so, if I could do that for you let me know” and that could be your newsletter ok or that could be your email and just get that out to do the special report or any important announcements you may have, or your “100th client”, “the 50th basement you’ve refinished”, “the first house of the Spring to be painted”, you know all these different things you can put in there as like announcements as a way to contact people and be friendly. You can also give them access to your social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn which we talked about before and then the other one which is really tacky and that is you can give them a summary of the articles that you’ve written to your blog, using a very technical term it’s called an RSS feed basically it takes your articles and sends them out from your website automatically via email to your email list and if you need help setting that up let me know I can definitely do that for you or your webmaster could do it to but I’ve done this before so I know exactly how to do it but you can actually have that done for you and have your articles sent out automatically to them and so that’s another way to keep in touch with people.
Jassen: OK.
Until my next post,
James
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