The Lost Art of a Direct Mail Letter

How to design your direct mail letter.  How to make your direct mail letter look easy to read — even if it isn’t!

THIS IS A TECHNICAL ARTICLE ON LETTER DESIGN.  Because you can keep readers reading longer – by using all the techniques found in this article on letter design.  Get more response and phone calls.

Learn how to use all the letter design elements available to you and still keep your sales letter looking like a letter: Bold, italics, short paragraphs, bulletted lists, white space, Johnson Box, marginal writing, centered copy, indented paragraphs – you know, stuff like dat dere.  A technical article for those that like specifics.

How To Write The World’s Greatest Sales Letter

A companion article to The Lost Art of a Direct Mail Letter.  Covers copywriting a great letter like the dew on a cool summer morning.  Only more helpful if you need clients and prospects to call you. Technical.

Dobkin puts it like this: “Frankly, I use typographical errors and misspellings to make sure people read my letters – because when I have a spelling error deep in the copy everyone seems to find it and point it out to me.”  OK, maybe that’s not the best way to increase response, but there are plenty of other ways – and this technical article by Dobkin on letter design shows you how.  Dobkin can be pretty funny, though…

How To Get Your Product In Catalogs

As the President of the Philadelphia Inventors Alliance I see and speak with a lot of inventors.  Most inventors ask me the same questions – where can I sell my invention.  The FIRST place I generally recommend inventors to sell their product is into the catalog industry.  Some catalogs have hugh circulations – 20, 40, 60 million catalogs a year.  Imagine if your product was offered in 20 million catalogs?  Wow, home run!  No easy task, but it can happen.  This article shows you in six steps where to find catalogs that might be interested in your products, and what it takes to get your product included in their catalog.

The Simple Objective of a Marketing Plan

This is a  highly technical article  showing the wide margins of a marketing plan, then distilling it into its essence.  If you want your eyes to glaze over, this is the marketing article for you.  It’s also good for putting your kids to bed.

However… for technical marketing geeks like Dobkin, this is Nirvana. For the rest of us, it’s just technical and geeky, with a few typos thrown in so the picky bastards out there will have something to show their friends.  Make no mistake, this highly technical article is the real deal on marketing.  This 15 minute read has so, so much information crammed into it in a fully readable style of writing it will beef up your marketing expertise in just a few minutes of enjoyable reading.  A “MUST READ” for entrepreneurs and serious start-ups.

The Strategic Use of Letters

So what else can a well written and well placed letter do?  You mean besides increasing response, increasing phone calls, getting you more business than you ever thought possible, doubling your customer loyalty, and keeping you in your customer’s mind when he or she needs to make a referral?  Read this article to find out.

Magazine Publishers Hate Me

How To Buy  Magazine and Newspaper Ad Space at Discount!  Learn the secrets of how to get huge discounts when placing ads – sometimes as much as 70%, 80% even 90% off of advertising rates when placing advertisements in magazines and newspapers.  This is an explicit no bullshit article that shows you exactly how to buy ad space at a discount.  Read this article to learn the entire negotiation process for magazine discounts.

If you’re placing a lot of print ads in newspaper campaigns, you won’t want to miss Dobkin’s in-depth, even more technical article:

Buying newspaper ads at steep discount.

Learn how to buy newspaper space like a pro – at a discount of 70%, 80%, even 90% off list.  This article is about “remnant space” buys in newspapers and magazines: buying advertising space at even steeper discounts.  Learn all about Remnant space, also called standby space, in these two great articles that actually show you how to negotiate like a pro when buying ad space.  If you buy a lot of print ads, you need to read this article.

Learn the advertising rate game from someone who has purchased advertising from all kinds of large and small publishers for the past 30 years. This article reprinted from the chapter on advertising in his book, How To Market a Product for Under $500!.

Marketing with Post Cards

Post cards are an awesome form of print media to use in your marketing. You can send just a few, or hundreds, or hundreds of thousands and still run an effective and efficient direct marketing campaign.

This is the first in a series of half a dozen explicit articles on post cards found on our website.  Learn how to create effective post cards and use them to create successful, easy to run low cost marketing campaigns.  Post cards are easy to use and cheap to print. There are a lot of ways to increase your response – you can learn the easy-to-implement writing and design techniques in this article to make your post cards highly responsive.

The Top 14 Questions In Marketing Answered

The top questions I’m most often asked about the different phases of marketing. For example, in direct mail: what’s best way to get your direct mail package opened, and what’s a good response to a mailing?  A short 8-minute read.

Questions in PR – what’s the easiest and fastest way to increase the number of magazines that publish your press releases?

This article has the no bullshit easy to read and quick-to-employ answers.  Lean and fast, a good technical article on direct marketing.

The 10 Worst Mistakes in Direct Mail

A more serious technical article exploring what cripples response in a direct mail campaign. Do you make these mistakes?  Yea, we bet you do… Read this article and at least you won’t make these mistakes again.  Don’t worry – you’ll make new ones.

Marketing Audit Questions

63 Marketing Audit Questions I ask every firm owner about their marketing campaign.

But what the heck is marketing, anyhow?  Read this brief marketing article and quickly bring clarity and vision to your marketing team… and marketing campaign. Learn more about your own marketing plan – in 1,412 words – than you ever thought possible.  A short and extraordinarily valuable course in marketing, condensed into a 5-minute read.

You Emailed What!!!?

A seriously fun article on why you should use email in a pinch or for a brief note, and why you should send a letter for important matters.  This email article brings to light the lasting ability of a letter while email communications are so fleeting and get deleted carelessly, unless of course you say something you’ll regret. Then they stick around forever.  This marketing article is a great read: fun in places, and serious when it needs to be.

The Simple Objective of a Marketing Plan

For you technical, geeky kind of marketing people – this one’s for you!  A technical marketing article just so you can see Jeffrey is more than just a pretty face, and isn’t all fun and games.  While his spelling sucks and his proofreading skills are sometimes less than spectacular, his knowledge about marketing and direct marketing runs pretty deep.  You can see that in this very technical direct marketing article.  It’s quite a read.

Trade Show Mailers

Some clients not only like trade shows, they thrive on trade shows as a lifeblood of their marketing. Ridiculous as this may seem trade shows are the successful marketing method of choice for many firms.

Direct marketing can make trade shows even more effective: Use a Pre-show mailer.

A pre-show letter is fine, so is a post card. Mail two weeks before the first day of the show, to arrive in your prospects’ hands a week before the show. Mail first class. Don’t use a label, they look cheap. Always have. And you know that cheap suit you bought a few years ago and said “maybe no one will notice?” They do. It looks cheap, too. Get a new one. Read more trade show tips in this fun read.

Almost seriously, this is a ‘funnier than all get-out’ article yet very informative.  All about how to increase your booth traffic at trade shows.

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