[Hovis]

Has anyone ever had any success with postcard mailers to merchants for MCA?

[DirectMedia_Scott]

Hovis, I'm biased, but with any marketing campaign, if you can pay only for the response, that's the best way to do it. Whether its radio, television, online, or mail.

Has anyone ever had any success with postcard mailers to merchants for MCA?

[Franklin]

While trying a variety of different methods for marketing, I've seen the best success is when you select one method and stay with it until you MASTER it. Trying one avenue and failing, then trying another one and failing, then another one, and another, is the same as gambling that this brand new batch of magic beans you just purchased will be any different from the last 3 bags of magic beans you just bought, planted, and watched not grow.

You have to learn why they're not working. Try different methods but commit to selecting one and testing it over and over and never stopping until you are an expert at it. Then you'll see that in reality, every form of advertising has about the same chance of failing or succeeding, the difference is your knowledge, application and experience. One or two tests for a few hundred bucks does not give you enough education to understand why you failed to the point where the next inhouse marketing decision you make will be a good one.

I know a direct lender that gets 60% of their business from mailers, I know an Iso that gets 200 leads a day from voice broadcasting, and I've seen email campaigns using a gmail account generate 20 leads a day, that would pull in multiple 7-8 figure owners per batch, including chefs that were on Jay Leno, restaurants featured on Food Network, businesses owned by NFL players (they look for loans too!), and a hotel commercial deal with Jeff Lewis from Bravo. These are done by marketers who took the time to fail repeatedly until they reached mastery.

These people out here are begging to give you their money. Are you man enough to take it?

Go and do likewise...if you don't, I've got no sympathy for you.











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www.UCCRadar.com

[GRP Funding]

Has anyone ever had any success with postcard mailers to merchants for MCA?

Yes - we work with a few sales offices that use postcards and other direct mail as their primary lead sources

[JSL23]

Yes - we work with a few sales offices that use postcards and other direct mail as their primary lead sources

GRP- I have had a lot of success in the past (pre-MCA) using Direct Mail or postcards. We would send out 10,000 at a time and get back 300-400 usually and 30%+ would close. Unfortunately we were a small shop with a relatively low ticket item($400-$1500) so we switched to email and fax marketing, which was more cost effective.

What, in your experience has been the rate of return for direct mail?

[Finance1]

GRP- I have had a lot of success in the past (pre-MCA) using Direct Mail or postcards. We would send out 10,000 at a time and get back 300-400 usually and 30%+ would close. Unfortunately we were a small shop with a relatively low ticket item($400-$1500) so we switched to email and fax marketing, which was more cost effective.

What, in your experience has been the rate of return for direct mail?

Back in 2010-2011, all we did was direct mail. We used to mail 25-50k pieces a month. Response rates ranged from 1-4%. The high responses were from UCC lists. This was good and bad. High response keeps agents busy but UCC lists are probably the lowest quality calls you can get so lots of wading and weeding. The low responses came from targeted lists (chiro's, dentists, salons, auto, etc) but they were much higher quality.

Postcards has the lowest response. Official looking pieces like check letters and notifications did the best by a mile but they cost more. We did an analysis of over 500k pieces of mail and the marketing cost per closed deal was around $700.

Mail is tricky because it takes several months for each mailing to run its full course. This makes the initial investment scary for many. Mailing anything less than 5k is typically a mistake. Small mail campaigns have skewed results. If you take a 10k list and break it up into (4) 2,500 piece drops, each separate drop will perform differently because of the small sample size. Too many folks make the mistake of an initial small drop. If you get a crappy result then you quit at a loss. If you hit a home run then your expectations for future drops are out of whack.

Mail is a great marketing tool but it takes plenty of guts and a solid starting budget. The calls are only one piece of the puzzle. You have to have really good people answering the phone. Calls come in way beyond business hours so you have to account for that as well. Never let a direct mail call go to voicemail. A live person must be ready from 7am to 8pm to take calls. Saturdays as well. Not a big call volume on Sat but each call is worth its weight in gold. You never know when the big 200k deal is coming. Those are what make profits. 5-10k deals pay the mail bill.

[Franklin]

Good points Finance1.