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Thoughts on direct mail using postcard campaigns and the value of A/B Testing.

Amazon-Proof Your Business➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook/

Transcription

Direct Mail, form or function.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

When I’m talking direct mail, today, I just happened to be talking about postcards. Okay.

This comes from a discussion that I was having earlier today with one of my clients.

So we were talking about this because they were designed a postcard to drive traffic to a webinar, which is a great idea. If you haven’t used direct mail, to get people to do something online, it really is quite useful. Okay, it all depends on how you go about doing it and what type of results you’re looking for. That all plays into it.

But it’s something worth considering, especially if the whole idea of why you’re getting them somewhere online is to get money. All right.

So in the process of developing anything that has any creative aspects to it whatsoever, you’re going to oftentimes have a discussion that comes up of form versus function. In other words, does it matter whether something looks good or not, if it functions properly.

So she had produced a beautiful postcard to be able to go out. And I was looking at some of the functional elements and wanting to change some of them. And I’ll just give you an example. That ugly, can work just as well, if not better than beautiful.

This is the thing, I don’t really have much of an eye for beautiful. Now, sometimes it can go the other way around, these things all have to be tested, right. But this wasn’t a situation where there’s going to be an A B test of back and forth, where you send off and when a B test is when you have two different versions going out, and you see what type of results each version gets.

We weren’t going to be doing that. So it was kind of a one off deal.

And so I’ll show you this is a I’ve talked about Dan Kennedy’s group, the N0BS Inner Circle, they send me things in the mail once in a while, look at how ugly this thing is.

So there’s a little picture showing you what you can get. They’re trying to get you to do this on demand things. So they have they show pictures of all this on demand stuff. But it’s all words, all words you got you got a headline, a little bit of text. And the text is horribly ugly. It’s a, you know, it’s almost like typewriter type text, okay.

attempting to get a very specific reaction to get a very specific call to action, something very specific to be done online. So this is a very similar situation that I was dealing with earlier today.

When you’re dealing with that creativity is oftentimes very an emotional thing to begin with. And beauties in the eye of the beholder. So it all depends on who’s looking at it. And one thing, if you’re using a postcard, no matter what it’s seen as commercial, right?

I mean, something is unless you’re making it appear to be a personal postcard, which don’t happen as often as they used to, you know, people send in postcards, on vacation, and so forth. And if you’re getting it at work, it’s probably not one of those anyways. So unless you’re trying to hide it and make it appear to be something that it’s not, it’s going to be considered commercial to begin with.

That’s an automatic reason for someone to take it and chuck it as soon as they realize that it’s a commercial. But if you can grab their attention in any way, either by making it too ugly, or having a very captivating image, or text on it, to be able to pull them in so that they’ll pay attention long enough to get the message and move on it.

That’s the function of it and is it form or is it function. I always say that form should serve function when it comes to business mail, because we’re not looking to get an award on how beautiful it is. The beauty should be there only to serve the function so here’s here’s a quick way to be able to fix this.

Because there’s always going to be arguments about this back and forth. If you as long as you have someone that knows what they’re doing, you’re gonna have arguments back and forth, because there’s always going to be somebody defending making something more pretty or beautiful, or eye catching or what have you.

Here’s how you solve it.

Put out two versions, just like I said earlier, it’s the AB test, put out two versions and put them both out and see, you got to go to a wide enough audience. So that it’s not, the difference isn’t negligible.

I don’t think they were going out to a wide enough audience for this particular scenario. So I didn’t even suggested. But if you really want to solve the problem, have two different versions have a real ugly one that goes out and have a really beautiful one that goes out and see which one does better?

Sometimes, it can honestly go either way.

You’ll never know until you test it. It depends on what it specifically is that you’re asking them to do. How many people you’re asking to do it, how easy it is to be able to do it. And who that market is that you’re trying to get them to do the specific thing, right?

Very tactical, we’re talking very specific tactics, but there’s strategy behind the tactics, you just have to think a little bit longer about these things. And consider all options on the table doesn’t make one side right or one side wrong.

But like I said, when it comes to business form should serve function, as opposed to the other way around. It’s more of an of an order that things go in versus what’s more important than the other it isn’t, it isn’t one things more important than the other, just one thing precedes the other in the process.

So hopefully that makes sense to you. If you want to learn more about the wide spread strategies, the type of things that you focus on years ahead of schedule, and build up towards.

That’s what my book is all about, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, go check out a free copy you go get get a free copy that you can have for the rest of your life, digital copy over at AmazonProofBook.com. Or you can go buy a hard copy over at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere that you purchase books. Or you could type the name right into Google and see where it takes you.

9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business by Brian J. Pombo. You have a great night. We’ll be back here tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.