Last night I was invited to sit in on a conference called covering real estate, flipping homes, and investing in properties. I was surprised to learn that the speaker, a super successful real estate investor, found most of her clients by looking up the names of lawyers in the yellow book and sending them fancy — wedding invitation style — letters introducing who she was and the type of homes she was looking to buy.
She stressed the point of purchasing fancy stationary for the following reasons:
- It gets past the gatekeepers who screen all mail
- It’s more memorable and leaves a good impression with people
- It shows that you are a person of quality and prestige
Every 90 days this real estate investor sends a few hundred of these fancy letters with top-notch envelopes to lawyers who would be interested liquidating homes for their clients — such as divorce and real estate lawyers.
Her advice got me thinking and I believe that there is merit in using snail mail as an effective means of marketing and communication with your friends, clients, and prospects.
I know… I know… we’re all so caught up in this web era and most of us cringe at the thought of circumventing the all-might email. But looking back, every time I send a hand written letter to someone, I always get a different response than I’d get with an email.
People seem to appreciate hand written letters more than emails. They understand that you took time out of your day to sit down and actually write out a message.
There’s also a palpability factor here: people want to hold things, feel things, and intimately experience things. The desire to physically hold something and read it will never be trumped by the net (well, at least not for me 
).
Give it a shot. If time permits, send someone a nice letter instead of an email. I can almost guarantee that you’ll experience praise and joy from the recipient.
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lawyers take snail mail more seriously, then email…specially if it looks customized for them.
so figures, the lawyers would respond.
as for personal communication, casual or business…i don’t see why someone would go the snail mail route.
and snail mail is very expensive, relative to email, to produce/send.
lol…the only nice snail mail letters i ever receive are from so-called seminar gurus doing an event in my local city. selling their “information packages” at the events – as you know seminars are total bs
Good point, lawyers are probably more used to receiving snail mail. Well, I guess I was leaning more towards thank you notes and friendly business messages to people you want to make a good impression with. I’m still all about email, that’s for sure. Just trying to shine some light on alternatives.
Dave (and everything else),
For communication, email is the way to go. But for MARKETING, snail mail definitely has a much greater impact. Here are just a few reasons why:
- Most consumers and businesses alike receive much more JUNK in their email than in their snail mail
- Most junk email is automatically filtered before it can even be seen
- Snail mail is only filtered if there is a gatekeeper, and as you said, even that can be circumvented with a strategy as simple as a nice envelope or package. Try doing that with email.
Aside from all of those technical reasons, snail mail just makes you seem more legit & hungrier for business. With email, it’s hard to distinguish between somebody looking to sell drugs from Canada and somebody looking to market a legitimate website such as Mind Petals. However, the minute you get a snail mail, you know some extra effort & dollars went into it – you know the company must think they are good enough.
And enough with the theory. I can personally attest to it. I own a web design & development company. I got started by sending snail mail TUBES (a letter in a tube) to thousands of potential customers, straight of a targeted mailing list. All in all, it cost $1,000 – $2,000, but at the end of the day, I am damn sure 99% of those potential customers opened the tube, and it resulted in a couple douzens calls, and a few clients worth a few thousands each. Talk about ROI.
I’ll leave everybody with this: In today’s Web2.0 world (cringe), never forget that:
1. Not everybody logs on daily or even has an email address. In fact, many people don’t. These people aren’t stupid for being behind the times. These people are a market. You’re stupid if you ignore them.
2. Most people who DO log on daily and have email to check do NOT take it anywhere near as seriously as something they can hold, with a physical return address and a PHONE NUMBER they can call.
3. Even if, at the end of the day, email marketing has a higher ROI for you, you shouldn’t give up on snail mail. As long as it has a decent enough ROI, then why not think about using it as a second stream? There is no reason to limit yourself to one marketing medium.
Interesting posting david. It’s probably something that i could put into practice with the scope of my business.
Goes to show that classic methods can have more of an impact on customers. It’s all about the tactile experience
Cheers,
Luc
Anthony, thanks for those awesome insights. I like what you did with the TUBES, awesome marketing tactic.
Luc, yeah sometimes we all have to go back to the basics. Give it a shot and see what happens, right?
Cheers!