A Never to be Missed Opportunity | BTalk Australia

(16min 44) Here’s a rare chance to learn the techniques used by copywriting experts. Direct mail (DM) is a vital part of your marketing mix – probably more so now than ever. By spending a quarter of an hour listening to today’s podcast you’ll learn to maximise the DM opportunity.

You’ll hear BTalk’s Phil Dobbie talking to professional copywriter Richard Fellner about techniques for producing effective direct mail letters and emails.

Find out how to hold attention and increase sales. You’ll also be exposed to the common pitfalls that can hide your message and, worse still, devalue your company brand.

It’s a lively discussion with some simple rules that you can apply straight away. So don’t miss out – click on the player and listen today. It’s totally FREE!

(By the way, this was Phil’s attempt at DM copywriting. What do you think? Add your comments in the Talkback section at the end of this post).

And don’t forget to subscribe to BTalk Australia on iTunes so you never miss out on expert advice, every weekday.

View all BTalk Australia podcasts here.

• Transcription

Phil Dobbie: Hello I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today the art of writing concise and effective direct marketing copy.

You’re writing a direct mail piece, it seems like it’s an art form as old as the ark. Doesn’t it? Well almost. I don’t think anyone who didn’t actually know Noah would have actually been invited on the ark otherwise it would’ve been very crowded. But I digress. So, how do you write a good piece of direct mail? Well, Richard Fellner does it for a living. So, Richard, how do you start the whole process? Do you just put pen to paper and give it a go or do you need to think a bit about it beforehand?

Richard Fellner: I know a lot of writers who will just put pen to paper or keyboard to stream straight away. And a lot of them can be very successful at that. But, what I prefer to do and what I would say, the majority of writers would do is determine your goals first of all. I personally go through the who, what, when, where, why and how, and determine exactly what you want to say and what you want to get out of the piece. With the whats you look at what you’re offering, what you’re going to sell, what you want the customer to do. The who, who are they? That’s probably the most important thing right there, is who’s your target market.

Dobbie: And how do you find that out?

Fellner: A lot of times you would hopefully know a lot of this from doing some research, some customer research or buying research or doing a lot of stuff on the internet. It depends on if you’re a contract writer for another company. You would need to get a brief from them saying, what are the age ranges, what are the hot buttons that these people will need pulling on their heart strings? How can I get them to do something, to take an action?

Dobbie: I guess you also need to know who your competitor is as well, just as much.

Fellner: Absolutely. And you need to know who the competitor is, the messages that they’re sending out. What your unique selling proposition is against them whether what you have that no other competitor has. And so just as much research needs to be put into what your competitors are doing as to what you’re doing.

Dobbie: Are competitors fair game in direct mail? Can you say lines like unlike our competitors we don’t use carcinogenic substances in our yoghurt? Can you do stuff like that or are you treading a line there?

Fellner: I always prefer to take the high road. I try to keep all my pieces positive in nature because the human brain, when you start seeing negative things the human brain can kind of tune things out. So, I always prefer, and that’s what I’ve always been trained as well, is keep things on the positive note. If the competitor is attacking you in certain ways, you don’t have to attack them back. You can take the high road again. And I think generally people would appreciate that a bit more even at a subconscious level than when you get into a war of words. But look, you can certainly work. And you see a lot of competition out there saying, unlike our competitors who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we do this. And if you do it tactfully and carefully, it can certainly work.

Dobbie: An offer’s important, isn’t it, when you’re looking at direct mail? But is it essential and if you haven’t got a great offer that could do more damage presumably than just a letter that’s telling you how things are.

Fellner: If you’re going to go to all the expense and time of putting together a direct mail piece whether it’s print or online, you need to have some kind of call to action in there. So, even if you don’t have a strong offer put a call to action in and say come visit our website for more or give us a call for more information or something. But, otherwise, you’re just sending out a piece of paper at the end of the day. And that can cost money. So, you might as well try to get something out of it even if it’s just getting them to visit the website so that you can get more unique browsers or page views to your site.

Dobbie: It’s a bit of fluff otherwise, isn’t it? And I guess you want to have something that you’ve got to track and monitor against it.

Fellner: Exactly right. And I think these days, especially, people are tracking and monitoring the results more than ever because the dollar is getting tighter. So, you have to measure and account for every single cent that you’re spending because otherwise it’s just a branding exercise and you don’t know if it’s worth your time.

Dobbie: Directly or indirectly, it’s a sales piece isn’t it? So how’d you get the balance right between being too hard sell and being so soft that people miss the point if you don’t realise you’re trying to sell something.

Fellner: That’s probably the hardest thing to do in any direct mail piece. I guess it’s going to vary from industry to industry and target market. Some products absolutely require a hard sell, if you’re playing that we’re the cheapest on the market kind of game or if it’s something that they have to buy, straight away you need to be a little bit harder. If you’re selling a high priced service that may not be as tangible, you need a softer sell. And you also have to think about the long-term value of the customer. So, if you’re pushing it hard and you know they’re going to buy from you once and then maybe never come again, then you can have a little bit of a harder sell. But if you think that you might get some really good lifetime value out of this potential customer then a little bit of a softer sell will set you up a relationship, if you will, with that potential customer.

Dobbie: I guess you should always cut to the chase in the first sentence, shouldn’t you, or the first paragraph.

Fellner: Absolutely. I think the first sentence is the most important. It’s the key if you’re doing a printed piece and they open up the envelope the first thing they’re going to look out is your intro line. And if it doesn’t grab their attention straightaway then the thing’s going to go right in the bin. Email is exactly the same way. Your subject line has to be extremely important just to get them to open it. Once they open it you need to have that absolute killer opening line or headline to get them to read on, and every line after that needs to support your first line. So you start with your most important point straightaway, and then you start getting supporting pieces from that and then at the end you’re going to feed back into that most important point and just say here’s what you need to do if you want to get the benefit or get the value.

Dobbie: Wen you are writing a piece, do you write that first line numerous times? Or that you start writing something and keep on going back to that and refining it once you start to hone the message a little bit more?

Fellner: That’s right. I think, for me, I’ll spend 90 percent of my time working on the headline or that first line. I’ll usually write down a couple dozen different ones. And it’s really hard, I should say it’s really easy to get stuck at this point and then not work on the rest of the letter. But you just bang out as many ideas as you can in the beginning. Then write the piece. And then you go back and rewrite your headline. And what you’ll find is that a lot of those initial headlines that aren’t as good can actually be really good subheads or can be good beginnings of sentences.

It’s an ever-changing thing. You have to keep going and continually refine it and then continually test it and make sure that every word on there is important because otherwise it’s just fluff. And people will spot the fluff even at a subconscious level and ignore it.

Dobbie: I tell you anything, an email or letter that starts, there’s never been a better time, for me, I never get any further than that. But it must be hard because there are a lot of a lot of hackney phrases that go around on there and keeping it fresh must be difficult.

Fellner: It’s very hard. And I think you’ve got to avoid the cliches. And also a lot of language from TV has started to filter into print. You’ll see direct mail pieces that have lines like but wait, there’s more.

And that is a line written for the ear and not written for the eye. And that’s a critical point that a lot of seasoned copywriters will understand is writing for the eye versus the ear.

A lot of people who don’t really know how to write or think that they can do it themselves can make that mistake. And it will just look horrible on a printed piece.

Dobbie: What are generally the tricks in terms of style? I guess keeping stuff short is pretty crucial, isn’t it — short sentences and short paragraphs so that people can consume it easily?

Fellner: That’s right. You’ve got to keep it short and sweet. Keep it at a ear five or ear six level because you don’t want to alienate anybody. But, at the same time, any big words is a stumbling block. It’s a little bit of a roadblock for people to get over. The eye will sometimes skip over it or whatever. I think the key is to write invisible copy, copy that isn’t seen as oh hey that’s clever but just copy that people read without thinking. And then when they get to the end there’s that call to action that all the sudden they click or they’ll call without even thinking. A lot of people make mistakes when they write trying to say well we’re going to try to sound very academic and we’re going to use these big long words. And it can work for a very small percentage of your target market. But, in general, you’ve got to keep it clean. You’ve got to keep it short, punchy, short sentences, short paragraphs. All the paragraphs lead to the next paragraph. And in terms of style that you mentioned, you want to keep it really clean. If it’s a printed piece keep it one font. Don’t over underline. Don’t over bold. Don’t highlight. I just got a DM piece the other day that had probably 60 percent of the thing had that yellow highlighter font on it, which you look at it and I just need to put on sunglasses. It was bright. So really you shouldn’t be doing more than one line or a word in an entire piece, maybe a couple. Just keep it down because every time that you underline or adjust the font it takes away from the previous one.

Dobbie: What about dot points and subheadings?

Fellner: Absolutely, keep those short and sweet. And bulleted form is the easiest. If you look at a paragraph on a piece of paper or even online, you’re not going to want to read more than a line or two. And, if you have those bullet points absolutely put them in there keep it short and people will read those a lot more readily than they will a long paragraph.

Dobbie: I guess that’s the key isn’t it? If you have dot points even if they’re not going to read the whole letter, they may be drawn to those dot points. So you make them crucial dot points that relate to the offer.

Fellner: That’s right.

Dobbie: And then they have got the key message.

Fellner: That’s right, exactly.

Dobbie: Is there a difference between writing for direct mail and writing for email or are they pretty close?

Fellner: I think there’s a massive difference between writing for online versus writing for print. I think a lot of the same basics will still apply like we’ve talked about getting the most important point in the beginning, talking about the what’s in it for me, which actually we didn’t chat about but I should mention here. A lot of times you’ll see directly mail pieces that will say how great our product is and how great this thing will be and so forth. But a good direct mail piece needs to focus on the target page saying here’s how you will benefit from our product or here’s how you can get out of the situation that you’re in. Here’s your help. Here’s the thing that you need.

Focusing on those will work absolutely for both print and email. But with email you’ve got the added obstacle that you have to keep it even shorter because first of all your subject line you’ve got to spend 95 percent of your time on that subject line to get people to open it. You need to, then, when they’re inside that keep all your images and all that stuff to a bare minimum, keep it as clean as possible. You have to make sure that you don’t have a lot of code. You don’t want to have a lot of HTML code or anything like that in there that can really mess up, it can display improperly in different types of email readers. It might work for Outlook but it may not work on Hotmail or Gmail, or wherever. So, you have to focus on a lot of that stuff as well.

And keep your entire message even shorter. A lot of times, if you’re doing an email piece, I see some that are just pages and pages long. But really, the better way to do it is to send a very short email that gets people to click and read the entire sales pitch on your website on a specific landing page where people can read at their leisure.

But you have to be careful there because a lot of people will read their emails when they’re offline. They’ll download stuff or they’ll read it on a BlackBerry or wherever. So you have to kind of be aware of all these things. Again, knowing your target market, knowing when they’re going to read an email, and everything about them before you even start writing the email in the first place. So, they’re very different animals.

Dobbie: Now the question that relates to any form of advertising, I guess, the use of humour. We’re told that it really helps advertising to become more effective. It can also be a dangerous technique. But then again some other brands depend on it. So, should you keep direct mail pieces straight or is there room for humour in them as well?

Fellner: There’s always room for humour but you have to be careful not to, because you can alienate your audience if you say something that you think is funny and they might not think it’s funny. It’ll actually take them right out of the moment. So you have to be extremely, extremely careful. Now, if your overall brand is based on humour like you look at some of the Carlton TV ads, they have this hilarious big funny things going on. You could follow that up with an email that’s got funny types of characters, for example, from the ads. You can have some very well thought out jokes here and there. But it’s an area to tread lightly. And it goes back to your entire brand proposition and your brand itself. Do you want people to look at your brand as a funny brand? Humour can certainly help but you just have to be careful.

Dobbie: There’s a lot to think about here Richard, so here’s the gratuitous plug at the end for professional copywriters everywhere. Thinly veiled. Should you do it yourself? Can you do it yourself? Or, is it something you should always outsource?

Fellner: I wouldn’t say you should always outsource it. But you do have to be careful. There’s a lot of money that you’re going to be putting into a campaign. And if you’re going to spend the money on a big direct mail piece then you really should consider looking at a professional copywriter whether or not you get them to write the piece, whether you get them to proof it and edit it, or whether it’s to consult just on the very beginning. I think it’s an important piece that you really can’t afford to not have. I think that copywriting these days is such a fine art form. And, even though I’m talking to the clients, for example, they may know their product inside and out. But they may not know how to write about it. So a lot of mistakes I see would be like a CEO or someone thinking, I can write, I’ll just go ahead and bang out some words and we’ll see what happens. But if you’re only going to get a 1 percent return or half a percent return or whatever on that, if you get a professional copywriter in there, you can probably boost, maybe even double your response rate. And if you’re talking big numbers that can save you heaps of money.

Dobbie: Absolutely.

Fellner: I would always say at least chat with a professional copywriter before you do.

Dobbie: And when I looked at the top 10 most paid professions in the world I’ve never seen a professional copywriter appearing in that top 10 list. So, I guess you guys aren’t so expensive either.

Fellner: No, it’s pretty affordable these days. I think you can get a really good copywriter for not a lot of money. It’s certainly going to be one of the least expensive parts of your entire DM campaign; when you consider postage and printing and all those other costs. And even with email, there’s still a lot of cost involved with that. So it’s certainly a good affordable part.

Dobbie: Excellent. Thank you very much for you time Richard. I’ll let you get back to your writing today. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Fellner: Thanks Phil.