Direct Marketing Examples

A varied group of marketing examples, both from companies I’ve owned and consulting clients. included are examples of how I invented, commercialized and sold over $40 million in consumer products at wholesale to retailers over 9 years.

A Promotion That Created $145 Million In Business

With the sticker company I owned, I noticed our 4 biggest competitors had sticker clubs for kids and had 40,000 to 50,000 members each. We heard retailers complaining because they felt these clubs were a way for the companies to sell direct to the consumer and bypass them.

That was never the intent, but that’s what the retailers thought, so I decided to do a club too, but do it differently by making it an obvious benefit for our retailer customers.

I set it up so the club was under the retailers name along with ours and had a large window poster, a point-of-sale display, a limited edition sticker-of-the-month, membership cards with the store’s name, a monthly newsletter and the monthly, dated, limited edition sticker. Since it was all designed around creating traffic for gift shop and Hallmark store customers, they loved it.

The Result

After 12 months, 900 stores as members, 900,000 kids as members, $145,000,000 in extra business for these stores in the first year.

Doubled Sales For A Denver Painting Contractor

A Denver painting contractor was stuck at the same level of sales and asked for help. After setting up a 39-point marketing campaign for their company including advertising, referral programs, direct mail, yellow pages, web marketing and more, their sales more than doubled in the first year. Their summertime sales from 2002 to 2004 ranged from $60,000 to $70,000 per month. This year’s sales were $160,000 to $180,000 per month.

For complete details on this program go to www.paintinginstitute.com and read about the details. Profitable Marketing Systems is licensing this program to painting contractors in other cities outside Denver.

$20,314 Profit Sending A Moving
Announcement For A Cosmetic Doctor

This client was moving their office and planned to send out a notice letting their customers know — obviously a good idea. I suggested we combine the move announcement with a promotion for a series of pre-paid cosmetic services.

The mailing brought in $22,660 in pre-paid advance sales for services from a mailing that cost only $2,346.

$13,570,000 Of Real Estate Deals Called
Our Licensee In His First Week

A licensee of one of our do-it-for-you foreclosure real estate marketing systems paid $5,000 for a mailing that got him calls from property 11 owners in San Francisco with over $5 million in equity asking for his help in the first week.

Our direct mail campaign gets people who never respond to mail offers to call. The complete details of this program and how and why it works are at our licensing site at www.foreclosuredealscallyou.com.

Client Who Mailed 2,000 Letters Without A Single Response Came To Us And Our irst Test Got 11 Responses From A Mailing Of Only 277

This is how I got into real estate marketing. My new partner, Scott, called to ask me about doing some marketing consulting to help him in his foreclosure business. He was having to cold-call and knock on doors to get deals.

He had tried a 2,000-piece mailing and was convinced direct mail didn’t work when mailed to people in foreclosure because he didn’t get a single call. I spent a number of hours with him to understand the mind-set of someone in foreclosure and wrote a new mailing. The first test mailing of 277 letters got him 11 calls.

We now have people tell us every day that they have received hundreds of pieces of mail and our was the only one they called.

We have since set up a partnership to do these deals. Scott is thrilled because the atmosphere when he meets with someone in their home is totally different. Instead of having to stick his foot in the door, they have the lemonade and cookies out for him.

Reaching the President of a Billion-Dollar Company

As anyone reading this knows who’s in sales, it’s not easy to reach the top person in a billion-dollar company. I had wanted to reach the President of Kinko’s to propose an idea I had about putting their stores into the promotional products business.

Since the executive secretaries/gatekeepers have the job of protecting their boss from exactly this type of thing, I had to be creative.

So, imagine you being this guy’s secretary and receiving this in the mail. What would you do?

You get a Hallmark greeting card addressed to your boss in a pink envelope with a large “Love” commemorative stamp. I had my wife address the card so it was obviously from a woman. How many secretaries do you think would open that? He didn’t go for my proposal, but I did get a response. A 100% response on a mailing of one. I did consider sprinkling perfume on the envelope but decided that might be a bit too much.