The most effective medium I have ever found for cold approaches is phone-mail-phone. You phone the person you want to get, check the name and tell him/her that you are going to send a piece in. No long chat, no detail, no questions other than checking the name and postcode. Use a native English speaker who knows enough about the UK to know how to pronounce such words as “Bicester” and “Leicester”.

Then send the direct mail, with its really exciting headline that forces everyone to read on.

Then phone up and say, “hope you got it - it had the headline xxxx”. (Don’t say, “did you get…” because the person will not remember that way - but if your headline is wonderful it will work.)

That works - but the problems are

a) it is expensive

b) it can slow you down, because you are sending out only as fast as you can do two phone calls.

I mention this because the National Client Email Marketing Survey has reported that 39% of firms think direct mail and telemarketing the most successful campaign media that can work alongside email marketing. 34% putting integrated email and telemarketing (without direct mail) in second place.

However, the DMA claim that on average companies only had email addresses for 50% of their database.

The DMA study also found email delivery rates were “slightly down” from last year, which it said was due to increased volumes and heightened competition in the sector. (Personally I think it is down to the fact that 98% of email is spam, and so the amount of stuff going straight to the junk box is rising).

There’s more about direct marketing on [1] www.hamilton-house.com -

Tony Attwood