[Franklin]

Prosper, which did more than $100 million in personal loans last month alone, acquired the lion's share of their customers through direct mail. They are masters of it.

Direct mail is excellent for Prosper's industry because they're dealing with every day consumers where anyone/everyone can be a customer.

Marketing products to regular every day joes is such a pain when learning to do correctly. In one sense it's great because it's a huge market, everyone's a potential client, but logistically it's a nightmare to efficiently filter out the candidates with an interest who match their criteria. And then when you add gov't regulations, forget it.

Email blasts to consumers about loans will quickly get you spam labeled; business owners will at least look at a letter that might be helpful to their bottom line. 99.999% of average regular people see no purpose in looking at a message that's not entertaining, even if it may be relevant in some way, so even with multiple servers, flipping IP's and content spinning, expect a ridiculously low response. Ditto for cold calling.

Don't even think of voice broadcasting consumers, I've seen real estate companies doing 10 million a month get shut down in 24hrs for that. (There is a way voice broadcast consumers without being a non-profit, without creating trouble however, but on a small scale). Turn and Burn sites can work if you have a unique offering and you use it more to build a list that you can drip-market to later.

Direct mail is ideal because the letter/postcard can be laying around for months, and there's a good chance at one point someone will see it, (maybe not even the intended recipient) and call. Again direct mail works very well when done consistently over time.