It might still work if you’re a pizza delivery company. In a business to business context, not so much.

Your target recipient is likely to be bombarded by unsolicited approaches, and just too busy to look at them... assuming they even make it into the right hands. If they do get as far as reading them, how likely are they to get around to following them up? And if you try to follow up yourself with a phone call, what do you think the likelihood is that you’ll make it past the intercepting receptionist / voicemail blockade and have a meaningful conversation with the individual you need to?

Direct sales is about loading the deck in your favour – which is why, over recent years, we’ve been increasingly advocating a different approach: personalised, targeted, high-impact, 3-dimensional mailers which are simply too good to throw away. And they really do work.

So much so, that we’ve been using them to make new contacts and win new business for BTL Creative, as well as for our clients. Individually, they work out relatively expensive, but when you calculate total campaign costs against total yield, they represent excellent value. Far better to send out 100 high impact mailers to specifically targeted prospects than 10,000 leaflets to a cold database.

Depending on the nature of your sales proposition and target recipient, you may still need to follow them up with a phone call – and it may take a few attempts – but

here’s the key: more often than not, you get to actually speak to the recipient, rather than being fobbed off as ‘another’ unwanted sales call. Even better, your mailer is likely to still be sitting on their desk, giving you an instant ice-breaker to talk about and ensuring that your message is front of mind. Which means that you get to have meaningful conversations.

Of course, turning such conversations into new business is likely to be dependent on a number of factors; such as how good your sales people are at closing, how relevant your service is to the recipients’ business and less controllable factors such as good timing (although even this is better with a high-impact mailer, because we frequently find that they’re kept for months or even years until the timing is right).

So what makes a good impact mailer? Apart from being individually personalised to the recipient, we like to always create what we call ‘a smile in the mind’ – something to catch the attention and which makes the recipient think ‘aha – that’s clever’. This could be as a result of relating it to current events, or perhaps an aspect of your business offering, or even to the recipient’s own business. Still ensuring, of course, that your core message isn’t lost along the way.

So when it comes to your next direct mail campaign, why not stack the odds in your favour with one of our mailers? They’re good fun to do too!