The full title of this book by Craig Simpson with Dan Kennedy is
The Direct Mail Solution: A Business Owner’s Guide to Building a Lead-Generating, Sales-Driving, Money-Making Direct-Mail Campaign
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a rating of 4 Stars. This means it is good and well worth reading.
Here is my book review.
Useful guide for mass mailings but it won’t teach you how to write the sales letter
This is a useful guide to direct mail although it’s more targeted to B2C mass mailings than it is for anyone who wants to mail to B2B targets and small lists.
As is often the case when there is a bug name author sharing credit with a less known author, it us the less well known one does most of the work. To be fair, there are more chapters from Dan Kennedy than I expected. As is normal in his books, you’ll be urged to buy plenty of other DK books.
It’s also American so the chapter on buying a mailing list will be frustrating to British business owners. From my experience, we have a more restricted system making it harder to identify precisely the best targets.
As well as selling direct from the direct mail piece, the book also covers website owners using snail mail to direct traffic to their websites with the aim of capturing email addresses or even creating a sale. This includes Google itself who post out offers of an amount of free clicks for AdWords.
I feel this provides good advice around the topic of direct mail but it won’t help you with the copywriting. You need other books for that and the book recommends one by Dan Kennedy, one by Robert Bly and several by Michael Masterson along with courses from GKIC and AWAI.
The advice includes considerations of the lifetime value of a new customer and the average acquisition costs which are essential to understand if your direct mail campaign is to be profitable. It also includes how to track and calculate this information. It’s an excellent reminder that writing the copy may need someone creative and empathic but managing the mailings and testing various elements needs the attention to detail of the nerdiest accountant.
If I was based in the USA and I wanted to run large campaigns with tens of thousands of targeted customers, I’d give this five stars. As it is, I think it is good but some of the content isn’t relevant to me or my normal clients.
You can buy the book from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.
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