It’s also about generating a list of prospects that are seriously interested in your products or service but are not quite ready to buy.

Here is a brief article on the large Catalog/Internet retailer, Crutchfield who sells a variety of home and car stereo equipment (annual sales of about $200,000,0000):

“Last fall Crutchfield did a test in its package-insert program (a ‘package-insert program’ is where one vendor, in this case Crutchfield, puts promotional materials in with the promotional materials sent by another vendor) with partners such as music club Columbia House and auto-parts dealer J.C. Whitney.
It (Crutchfield) split tested two cards with the rest of the promotional piece being the same. On one card the company’s URL was featured. The other card did not have the URL.

Catalog requests (remember Crutchfield is first and foremost a catalog company) were 40% higher from clients who got the card without the URL than those who received the card with the URL.

Examining the statistics revealed the obvious…those that requested a catalog were much more likely to buy than those that just frequented the web site.”

This brings out three critical points:

#1. Sales are good, in fact very good BUT many people are just not ready to buy right now for whatever reason and no matter how good your sales copy is you just can’t get them to pull out there credit card right now. But does that doesn’t mean you forget about those people that are interested but just not ready and this is where off-line marketing comes into play. It can ‘tickle’ the prospect’s memory to take action. The Internet just isn’t good enough in this area to be effective. Email and ezines you say? Most people are receiving so much and so many as to render electronic communication virtually meaningless. We just don’t have the time to go through it all AND THEN DECIPHER IT AND TAKE ACTION ON IT.

#2. Directing people to a website (even one as good as Crutchfield’s) without getting them to request a catalog first (in order to secure a name and address) will cost you money…plain & simple! I’ve noticed the same thing with the cosmetic products that I sell in daily newspaper ads. The ads that don’t contain a URL outperform those that due. Does having the URL in the ad spike the traffic to the web site? Yes! But it neither results in sales nor does it get me the names and address of many prospects. Could it be that my web site stinks? Certainly it could that’s why I hesitate using my own personal experience as an example. But it is interesting that Crutchfield is finding exactly the same thing and they do have a good web site.

#3. The soon to hit postal rate increase will make direct mail even more effective! Why? Because the bit-players and wannabe’s will drop out due to the apparent high cost of the conducting a campaign. The result will be that people will receive less mail so each received will become that much more important. Contrast this with electronic marketing. Does anyone foresee a decrease in the use of this media anytime soon? Heck no, all the do-it-for-free folks are still out there and continue to grow in numbers (with the ‘help’ of all the “Get Rich On The Internet” guru’s pushing them along). Remember when you use to get only a couple emails per day? How ‘cool’ was that? Is it still ‘cool’ sorting through 10, 20 or even 100 per day like you or I get? Most of which is garbage and considerably worse than any junk mail ever stuffed in our mail boxes.

I feel sorry for the folks that haven’t had the opportunity to work in the off-line marketing world. If you did you would know how important those numbers Crutchfield revealed actually are. Yes, sales are good but developing a qualified list of prospects is money in the bank and often the difference between profitability and profitlessness. What are your feelings and more importantly experiences?

Take care,

Mike Winicki