How to Make Direct Mail Profitable...
The Key is the "Personal Touch"

An agent of ours who mails over 300 prospects every month explains how she creates the personal touch, "My contact manager mail merges a nice personal letter to each one of my prospects. Then I have my niece hand address each envelope. She then signs my name, folds, stuffs, seals, and stamps each envelope with a first class stamp. I pay her 15 cents per complete mailer. She makes a little money and I save myself a ton of time. Plus the mailers have a real nice personal appearance."

The keys to the "personal touch" are:

• Always mail merge the prospects name into your letter.

• Never, ever, ever, use mailing labels! It’s cold and impersonal!

• Either print envelopes or have someone hand-address them for 5-7 cents each.

• Sign every letter, pay someone 3-5 cents to sign them for you, or laser print your signature with a good enough laser printer that you can’t tell it’s printed.

• Use a live first-class stamp. Don’t meter or bulk mail.

You can pay people to put together mailings for you and you should be able to get them completely done and mailed for about 50-60 cents a mailer. Also there are companies that will do the job from start to finish for a little bit more, generally about 70-75 cents per mailer.

Again, if you are going to prepare the mailings you’ll need a good word processor and contact manager. With these programs you can "personalize" literally thousands of letters and prepare them with little to no time spent. And that’s the key - little to no time spent! You need to develop ways of getting things like this done without exhausting your time. Your time at its highest level is worth $300-$500 an hour. By developing systems for getting the $7-$8 an hour work done, you can spend the majority of your time creating strategies for getting face-to-face with more good quality prospects.