How to market your business with direct mail

I was recently asked by a major business publication, my advice for how to market a SaaS (software as a service) company using direct mail. Although my answers below are focused on the SaaS company, these direct mail marketing strategies can be used by all businesses.

Question: "We are a SaaS company that delivers a fully integrated business and practice management system for chiropractors. However we are struggling with our marketing and sales as we are on a very tight budget. Can you give me any insight in how to create a direct campaign that will get the doctors attention, on a budget?"

To produce the best results for a direct mail program for marketing SaaS, there are several very powerful direct mail strategies you will need to follow to increase your response rate. These strategies will produce great results for all sales letters, not just SaaS.

1. At the top of your sales letter, use a strong headline that states the most important benefit your software provides to Chiropractors. This headline should be bold and a larger font size than the font size you use for the body text in your sales letter. A great headline promises a specific result. For example, “How to increase the productivity and profitability of your Chiropractic office by 37% in 60-days or less”.

2. Your sales letters must be personalized on both the envelope and within the sales letter. Do NOT say, “Dear Doctor” as it screams junk mail. You must address the Chiropractor by their actual name -- Dear Dr. Smith…

3. When writing your sales letter, always use a friendly conversational style. Do not try to write “cold and corporate" by using large words and showing off your vocabulary. All that does is turn people off. Instead, write your sales letter using friendly simply language as if you were talking to your best friend. I find the more friendly and conversational that I make a sales letter, the better the response I get.

4. Your sales letter needs to explain the benefits Chiropractors will receive. Understand that everybody cares about one thing - "What’s in it for me?" Put yourself in the Chiropractor’s shoes and ask yourself, "If I was receiving this letter, why would I want to buy the product being sold? What’s in it for me?" “How is it going to improve my life?”

5. Offer quantitative proof of how your software will benefit Chiropractors. This can be done by including several testimonials from Chiropractors where the testimonials state exactly how your software helped them. “I love this software. I have been using it for 7-months and it has made my office run like a fine oiled machine. Because of my huge gain in productivity, I can now see twice as many patients and my office’s income has more than doubled. I highly recommend it to all Chiropractors.”

6. Offer a 100% money-back guarantee. “Try our software for 60 days and if it does not increase your office’s productivity by at least 30%, we’ll give you a full refund.” Understand that the biggest hurdle in a sale is the perceived risk on the part of the customer. In their mind they are thinking, “What if this software is junk? What if I spend time and money implementing it and it does not work? Will other Chiropractors think I am an idiot for buying this software?” You must remove this risk by taking the risk on your shoulders and offering a powerful money-back guarantee so Chiropractors know they are protected financially if they try your software and it does not perform as promised.

7. To get your prospects to take action, your sales letter must ask Chiropractors to purchase by a specific date and give them a bonus for ordering by a specific date. For example, “Sign up for our business and practice management system for Chiropractors by July 29 and we’ll give you the first 2-months of service for FREE.”

8. Use a P.S. in your letter and restate your most power benefit and sales offer in it. Most people will read a P.S. first before reading the sales letter, so it is important that your P.S. has a very strong sales message and a call to action.

9. To get your sales letter opened handwrite the recipient’s name and address. Do NOT use mailing labels! Yes, this takes a lot more time than using mailing labels, but mailing labels scream junk mail and get your letter thrown in the garbage unopened. The first key in a successful sales letter campaign is to get your envelope opened, and by handwriting the recipient’s name and address, you can almost guarantee that your envelope will be opened. Admit it—when you get a letter where your name and address are handwritten, you open it.

10. Make your envelope "lumpy" by enclosing a small, inexpensive free gift. Make sure the gift has your company name and contact information on it and that the gift is something a person would want to keep - such as a nice pen, a good highlighter, post-it notes with your company information printed on them, etc.

11. TEST your sales letter on a small scale to measure if your sales message will generate a response. You will never know what sales message is going to generate the best response rate, so you need to constantly test, and you should always test on a small scale. The biggest mistake you can make is to do a large direct mail campaign without knowing beforehand what the response rate is going to be. That is how you lose your shirt in marketing. A good way to perform a test is to create a list of 600 prospects. Then, write three different sales letters. Send letter “A” to 200 prospects, letter “B” to 200 prospects and letter “C” to 200 prospects. Then, measure the results to see which sales letter performed the best (produced the most leads). Just by changing the headline of a sales letter, you can double or even triple the response rate. Then, use the best performing sales letter and send it to 500 new prospects to see if it will again produce a strong response. Continue testing like this until you have a sales letter that is a clear and profitable winner.

12. Use repetition. You will have far more success from direct mail marketing if you send it to the same group of Chiropractors at least six times per year. Monthly is better. Understand that many Chiropractors (like all types of customers) need to think about a product several times before they will buy it. Therefore, you need to keep your message in front of them, constantly reinforcing how your service will help them. Then, when they are ready to buy, they will contact you.

13. If your budget is small, consider using postcards with a 60-Day FREE TRIAL message to get Chiropractors to go to your website and try your service before they buy. Remember that the word “FREE” is the most powerful word in marketing, so use it. Again, remember to test different sales messages to see which generates the best response.

14. And last, the most important thing you can do is to follow up your sales letters with telephone calls. A week after sending your sales letters call the Chiropractors on your list and pitch them over the phone. See if you can get them to try a no-obligation free 60-day trial. Do whatever you can to get them using your service so they can experience the benefits for themselves and become a loyal, long-term client. With SaaS, you earn your profits over time, so do whatever it takes to get client to try your service and experience the benefits. This is how you will build a successful business with constant and predictable growth over time.

To your marketing success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
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