This is a transcript from the Marketing for Advisors Podcast. To listen, please visit mfapodcast.com and every episode is easily available and free to listen.
Don Anders: Hello, this is Don Anders and Donovan Stull and welcome to Marketing for Advisors. In this episode we're going to be talking about the tried and true the doing it cause we've always done it a snail mail. And so a lot of times people, they know I do digital. We actually went away from traditional mailers about a year ago. We tried to introduce some back but the results weren't there compared to digital for us costs per lead. People always ask me if they should continue or stop doing mailers. My recommendation is no, don’t stop for the sake of it. If it’s a big part of your business is doing mailers currently and it's working, keep doing it. Why would you stop something that your ROI positive on if you're getting a three to one return on mailers or four to one return and mailers? It's like pulling a slot machine that you know is going to return, you know, put a quarter in a slot machine and knowing that it's going to return a dollar. Why wouldn't you keep doing that?
Donovan Stull: Yeah, and everything that we've been talking about, you know, over the course of these last few episodes, you know, if we've done something and you know, it sparked a fire in you and you think that it's going to be great for your business, don't pull the plug on everything else that you're doing.
Don Anders: Yeah.
Donovan Stull: This is a slow introduction and it’ll take a few years of doing this on a regular basis.
Don Anders: And a lot of mistakes.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, a ton of mistakes.
Don Anders: It is ton of mistakes every day.
Donovan Stull: And marketing is all about learning something new every single day.
Don Anders: You have be okay with it.
Donovan Stull: You have to be open to trying new things and figuring out what's going to be working next week versus this week. It's, you know, a one algorithm change on Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and all over sudden now those platforms don’t work the same way, and we need to figure out something new.
Don Anders: But I would say that once again with mailers, if they are working, do it. But, how confident are we that they're always going to work? Because anyone who's been doing seminars since the 90’s or even mid-2000’s you know, that use the mail out a thousand pieces and you would fill up a seminar and now we see people that, you know, some people were still mailing three. I think that's the lowest we've seen. Some people are mailing five.
Donovan Stull: I see the average that we see is anywhere from the low end, probably seven, eight.
Don Anders: Yeah, I mean, every once in a while we'll talk with somebody, they'll do three but that's very, it's like a small, isolated Island or something like that. Or a little town. There's no other financial advisor or so, or you know, maybe they've been on TV for 30 years or something like that.
Donovan Stull: That goes back to brand recognition as well then.
Don Anders: Right, right, right. So, and that's if you want to, we did a thing on Facebook about branding on Facebook, but most people today, like diamonds said there's a few people doing five, but it's usually 7 to 12. But we've also seen some people who are having to mail out 20 to 25 thousands pieces.
Donovan Stull: And that's absolutely absurd to us.
Don Anders: Yeah, I know. So. And a lot of people now they're doing , a two part mailer where they mail and then they, and they mail an actual envelope and then like a week before, then they mail a postcard as well. So if you're mailing 10,000 pieces that way you're really mailing 20,000 pieces.
Donovan Stull: 20 to 30,000 if you're doing it, you know, we know some of our clients are those we've worked with in the past where they say, okay, we send out the initial mailer and you know, it's the call to action to come to a dinner seminar. Okay, fantastic. And then we also do a reminder mailer. If you haven't already, you know, responded, then now's a great time. Seats are filling up fast, even if they're not whatever. And then they'll do like a day before where it hits. One more time of don't forget about your event tomorrow at three pieces-
Don Anders: Yeah.
Donovan Stull: Of mail to, you know, 10,000 people, 30,000 pieces of mail. That's absolutely absurd.
Don Anders: BUT let's play devil's advocate. If you're ROI positive, you should keep doing it though.
Donovan Stull: Exactly.
Don Anders: So I think you should keep doing it. A backstory on me, I was never like a huge fan of digital anything. But the reason I got into digital marketing was I was doing mailers and I was doing it to a niche market on a list that I built and I really, I was mailing 2,000 pieces when I used to mail 200, so I wanted to get it back down to about 500. So I took my list, uploaded it to Facebook, and then I would target them with feel-good branding for about two weeks before just to make my mailer better. I never even thought about inviting somebody to a digital seminar or digitally to a seminar and having them RSCP until, you know, probably two or three years ago.
So, but we started doing that just to try to get our response rate a little bit better. And it did. And the guy, it got us from about 2000 pieces back down at 500 but even then we still don't do it because it's expensive. But I personally saw how it got 10 times more expensive. So, what my recommendation for a lot of you is, yes, you should still do mailers if you're ROI positive, do it. But I would also highly recommend you start building a net. And what I mean by that is you know a lot of you, and you do it for your clients, right? You build these financial nets where if everything collapses, there's some guarantees, there's some backing, whatever it is. Well, you need to build a net for your marketing. And if everything that you're doing is based on mail and you see a pattern, we all see a pattern of it getting more and more expensive and less and less effective.
Start building a net with digital where people actually are. And the way you build that net is not by taking everything and shutting everything down and ream. You know, focusing all your energy in one way, the way you start building that net is by taking maybe 10% let's say you have a hundred thousand dollar marketing budget, we'll take 10 grand, still do 90,000 let's say you take a hundred you'd spend $100,000 on mailers. Well, next year spend 90,000 and take $10,000 and put it towards building out your Facebook page or digital page, hiring coaches, come to classes, go to digital marketing conventions. We do digital marketing classes, those types of things and either start getting educated on it for your staff or start hiring someone to build the infrastructure for you. Because while mailers 100% still work, I am not convinced that will be the case in 10 years.
Donovan Stull: We talked about this in an earlier episode where the generation of people now who are retiring realistically, in conjunction with what Don's talking about, is that mailers will probably start to fizzle out for those who will actually respond to it because of.
Don Anders: I haven't looked at my mail at home in like 5-10 years.
Donovan Stull: That's the whole point. You know, when everything's going electronic, I mean obviously in bill pay now is all through, you know, electronic for the most part, I don't get a single bill that comes to my house.
Don Anders: Yeah and even at my office, they, if we, the mail that we get, if it's pertinent, my office immediately. Well we've gone digital on almost everything, but if certain companies aren't or maybe a client sends something in my office, immediately scans it in, uploads it, and then lets me know about it and it's there digitally. So, and that, and we're in 2020 technology.
Donovan Stull: Yes.
Don Anders: So where are we going to be in 2030, right? Or 2025 so if you know anything about Moore's law, the computing power doubles every two years. So if you take that, if everything's five times stronger in 10 years, it's going to be, you know my staff might be able to just send it to my brain. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen.
Donovan Stull: There's a, there's a big, you know, digital influencer marketer out there and he talks about back in the 80’s every single piece of mail that you got, you opened it. Because in the 90s when email was first, not first, but really becoming popular and you know, you're sending emails left and right. You opened up every single one of them.
Don Anders: Yeah.
Donovan Stull: Now we get hundreds of emails a day. 90% of them are probably junk or just things that we don't care about. And the rest of them were just having to constantly filter through. It's becoming like mail as well. Where we have to sift through it and figure out what's important and what's not about it.
Don Anders: And that's what most people aren't realizing is email right now is kind of where mail was 10 years ago. And digital is where email was 10 years ago. So Facebook is, you're getting the responses that you were getting on email 10 years ago and then on email, right now you're getting a response to that mail was. So I see mail phasing out. All I'm saying is I'm not saying this to stop it. I think I've said that a million times. What I'm saying is start building your net, because a lot of you plan on being in the business for five or 10 years, or even if you wanted to sell the business, he's going to want to buy a business that's 100% reliant on, on snail mail. That's not very valuable business. But if you have a business that's built out with infrastructure that can withstand the future, then you're going to get paid a lot better, if you're going to sell your business for that or if you're going to leave it to your kids or grandkids or whatever else, what's the way you should really look at it.
Donovan Stull: Once again, do not pull the plug on anything that you're already doing. This is just something to start thinking about keeping in mind. And if, if, if you are currently only doing mail and your ROI positive, fine, maybe just start thinking about what you might do if something were to change.
Don Anders: Well I wouldn't say maybe I think you should definitely start building something out. You know, you should definitely take some capital and start and start building out that net, that safety.That safety net just in case, not in case.
Donovan Stull: This is inevitable.
Don Anders: It will happen. I mean the, I don't know if it's going to be in two years or if it's going to be in 20, but mail is not going to be a way that is going to be profitable in the future, it’s just not going to happen. It's not going to make sense. And who knows? We might not even be delivering physical mail in the future. The post office is losing so much money, but that’s just kind of the concept there if you need help with that or if you want to go over, we do teach classes.
We don't like to do a lot of selling on this podcast, more educational, but we do teach digital bootcamps. If you're interested in that, you can go to apbootcamp.eventbrite.com and what it is it's a two day bootcamp at our offices in Orlando and we bring you in and we teach you in a staff member everything that we do in house and just kind of give you the infrastructure of exactly, you know, how to get up off the ground and start running ads on, on your own if you're interested in that. All right, let's wrap up. Thank you so much and appreciate you listening. We'll talk to you next time.