In the movie Fistful of Dollars, Ramon Rojo tells the Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood)...
"When a man with .45 (Man With No Name) meets a man with a rifle (Ramon), the man with a pistol's a dead man."
Similarly, when online marketers are trumpeting...
"When savvy email marketers meet snail mail direct response marketers, snail mail marketers and their clients are dead meat but they're just too stupid to realise it."
Then, at the end of the movie, The Man With No Name teases Ramon...
"When a man with .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol's a dead man. Let's see if that's true. Go ahead, load up and shoot."
In less than a minute later Ramon and his highly esteemed rifle were lying in the dust... dead... very, very dead.
So, what's happening here?
Yes, in general, email is more effective than snail mail, but there are many factors to consider.
If you are up to date on the overall effectiveness of email marketing, you most probably know that every $1 invested in it returns around $40, and you are most probably an enthusiastic user if it.
Yes, on average, email offers a better return than snail mail, but we'd better be careful with averages.
Imagine a hospital where the patients' average temperature is the perfect 37℃.
It looks nice on the surface, but not so fast, grasshopper!
Half of the patients are dead and the other half have high fever on the verge of dying.
There are certain situations when email just doesn't cut it and you'd better revert to snail mail.
Let's look at five of those situations...
There is no doubt that the very first contact is the hardest to make, so you may want to make it as memorable and competition-free as humanly possible.
The kind of decision-makers you're seeking receive 100+ emails a day and many of those emails are business solicitations.
It means, most emails that come from unknown sources get instantly deleted. In the worst case, you may even get reported for spamming.
So, if you join that email madness, you can be more doomed than a dormouse at a cat conference around lunchtime.
Yes, I know, may it be either email or snail mail, a lot depends on your copy.
But, in my experience, if you use snail mail, it's easier to get people's attention simply because they can spend more time reading your letter.
There is no rush to move to the next item because almost all the other snail mail pieces are utility bills, which most people as reluctant to read as a smoker is to go in for lung cancer test.
Also, people receive only a very few snail mail pieces, so your letter, especially if you make it a bit outstanding, gets more attention.
People often say email is better because it's more or less free.
Yes, it is.
But you can't make your emails as different from other people's emails as you can with snail mail.
You can send handwritten snail mail hand-written on yellow legal pad paper and put it in an envelope larger than the normal #10. Hand-address the envelope and put real stamps on it. Using several small-domination stamps, instead of one single stamp, creates further uniqueness.
In any pile of letters, yours stands out like a trombonist in a heavy metal band.
And since you're running a tight campaign and send out only 15-25 letters a week, your costs stay at a reasonable level.
It's important to know that most executives set their spam filters tighter than a camel's arse in a sandstorm, so your email campaign can become as futile as trying to nail jello to a tree.
So, snail mail wins again because it has a better chance to land in the hands of the right person.
Still, you'd better make sure your letters look like personal letters.
Don't send your letters on letterhead paper and company envelope with your logo.
It becomes as conspicuous as George W. Bush wearing a tarbush during an ambush and decision-makers chuck them in the nearest rubbish bin faster than you could say Zaphod Beeblebrox[1].
When you promote premium services, you need a certain level of panache, well, a certain je ne sais quoi in your promotion that email can't give you.
Granted, you can send the substance of your message in an email, but the style is missing or at least suffers pretty seriously.
It's like a marriage proposal in email. The words are there but the emotional part, the essence, of the message is missing.
The decision-making process for premium IT services is quite different from the decision-making process for mass-produced commodities. It's slower and more considerate.
Also, on average, there are six decision-makers on the buyer's side. More exactly, only 5.6, but how do you handle 0.6 of a buyer? See, I don't know either.
So, it's a good idea to prop up your message's substance with a little style. But make sure you use the right style. You don't want to be outlandish in style. Stay with some sort of subdued stylishness that is not too far out.
In any area of life, the first step is always the hardest to take.
In business development, the hardest step is to bring quality visitors to your website or other platform where they can enter your sales funnel. Visitors who are ready and willing to take the first step to initiate contact with you, enter your funnel and start their journeys in your conversion process towards the decision-making point.
Since this is a five-figure decision (the price of the paid discovery is about 10% of the typical project price), you want to make this first step to be as memorable as possible.
And again, snail mail wins. Considering the high client lifetime value, it's more than worth investing in.
Once you've started receiving enquiries, you can further qualify them and you can send "shock and awe" boxes to the most qualified ones.
In case you haven't come across the term, a shock 'n' awe box is a carefully compiled package that highly qualified new first-time buyers receive in order for the seller to make a million dollar first impression.
The idea is this...
When buyers receive the package and open it, they think to themselves: "If this firm offers this before receiving money, how much more can I expect for a fair price?"
Buyers get shocked when they receive their packages. We all know that most IT firms' communication methods are highly automated and their communication styles are cold and impersonal.
And then they are left in awe after opening their boxes and rummaging through the materials inside.
We know that during the first 57% of the sales cycle, buyers are unready and unwilling to talk to sellers, so it's pointless to initiate synchronous (or real-time) communication.
The best thing you can do here is to offer buyers the kind of materials that aid their due diligence. That can be...
Do you see the advantages specialists enjoy here too?
By the time buyers finish digesting your materials, your firm is likely to become the selected firm for the given engagement.
Yes, a good shock "n" awe box can cost $500 or more, but think about the high-five- or six-figure projects that this little box can pick up for you. The investment is more than worthwhile.
And while you're doing this, dozens of IT vendors are cold-calling and cold-emailing this buyer soliciting business.
And now let's address the...
Snail mail is more personalised, because readers actually hold the message in their hands. There is a physical connection to the paper and a certain feeling caused by the handwriting. Even by handwritten all caps printing. The sender can also inject empathy in to the letter.
By contrast, emails are almost totally impersonal.
Also note that often even a snail mail piece with "Dear Occupier" on the letter can be made more personal than an email with "Dear Mr. Smith".
So, you can imagine what happens to the emails that address me as "Dear Owner of www.varjan.com". This is a tad too much in snail mail too.
However, it' fair to say that snail mail is much more forgiving than email. A letter with "Dear Entrepreneur" is acceptable in snail mail, but a similar email would be instantly deleted.
Yes, snail mail can get away with less personalisation because the style and the fact that you hold it in your hands can compensate for it.
What causes this difference in digesting email and snail mail?
When you're reading email, you're in a rush mode because dozens or even hundreds of emails are vying for your attention.
But when you're reading your snail mail, you're relatively relaxed because this is the only snail mail piece of the day... maybe even the week.
Well, apart from some utility bills.
Even if your snail mail looks like junk mail, in your fairly relaxed state, you may open the envelope and give it a quick look. And if, after opening the envelope, you don't read the letter right away, you put it aside to read a bit later. So, the letter gets read, or at least scanned, before it gets chucked in the bin.
No one does that to emails. The typical read/delete decision takes three seconds or even less.
The other factor is length.
If it's well packaged and well written, people read people read 2-4-page (1,000 words or more) snail mail pieces.
But you can have a very hard time with 200-word emails. In most cases, they don't get read.
The next factor is memory footprint. That is, how big of a footprint your communication leaves in readers' memories.
The more personal the communication method, the longer readers remember it.
If you have a bad experience with a salesperson in a face-to-face or phone situation, you remember that for a very long time. It means you'd better not in initiate contact with that buyer for a pretty long time.
Since snail mail is less personal, it leaves a smaller memory footprint. If you don't get response to your snail mail sequence (never use a single letter, but a sequence of 3-5 letters), you can repeat it six months after the last piece in your letter sequence.
And since email is less personal and less engaging than snail mail, it leaves the smallest memory footprint. So unlike with snail mail, you'd better stay away from email sequences. But the good news is that you can send the next "intro" email a month later. That's more than enough time to erase you from the reader's mind.
Use snail mail when...
And there is one more thing. It may sound biased but that's not my intention.
Avoid making the typical mistake of hiring a top-notch graphics artist and the rock-bottom copywriter from Fiverr.
If you watch this video, you can better understand the role of copy vs. the role of images.
No, I have nothing against graphic artists, but I have nothing against running successful campaigns either. And in terms of financial success, copy is a tad more important than graphics.
And very finally, a few words about the numbers from the U.S. Postal Service, Radicati Group, Newdream.org, Pew Internet & American Life Project and Internet World Stats. They are based on 2009 studies.
In 2009, 14.4 trillion emails were sent. That's a whopping 39.6 billion per day. Of that, 19% was legit and 81% was spam.
By contrast, 177 billion snail mail pieces were sent. That is, 485 million per day. Of that, 53% was legit and 47% was junk mail.
81-times more emails were sent than snail mail.
So, you can see why recipients are pretty aggressive and impatient with email.
So what do you think? Would you give a try to snail mail in your client acquisition arsenal?
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It's all well and good, but to apply it all, you need to know how your target market perceives your.
Is it a fungible IT vendor or a respected IT authority?
It's the market that hangs your brand around your neck based on the outside perception of your firm.
But you can also influence the outside perception by tweaking your firm's inside reality, that is, your culture, by consciously transforming your firm from vendor to authority.
In this peddler quiz, you can check whether your firm is more of a fungible IT vendor or a respected IT authority.
[1] Yes, the notorious confidence trickster, past president of the Galaxy, inventor of the dreaded Janx Spirit-based Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and the winner of the "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe" award seven consecutive times. Continue where you've left off... (top of screen)
In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.