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01/05/2009: "How One Company Turned $50,000 into $13 million dollars and How You Can Too."

Do you want to make your advertising dollar to give you double, triple or quadruple returns? Perhaps even more? You can. Here's how.

You can't always personalize your advertising and marketing campaigns. But, when you can, you will enjoy a tremendous jump in response and in sales.

Let me explain.

The Mahoney Co., of Santa Clara, CA., recently sent out a direct mail piece that was highly personalized. They knew the upgrade schedule of their clients. So it was not hard to send them direct mail and email addressing the fact that now is the time to upgrade.

After determining customers’ upgrade schedules, the company sent personalized direct mail and email, complete with personalized URLs that led recipients to personalized landing pages.

WOW! Talk about getting personal. But, it works.

Web 2.0. You've heard all about it. Well, the entire world is now interactive. That's why personalization works so well. And that's why you should begin to develop as much information about your prospects and clients as possible.

The campaign above cost the company $50,000 and yielded 171 leads, a 9.2 percent response rate, and $13 million in sales. Not bad!

According to an article in Target Marketing magazine, "Results like these are causing many marketers to consider direct mail-to-landing page campaigns."

Have you and your clients given up on direct mail? If so, you're leaving the field wide open to a few smart marketers who see the value of that empty mail slot.

Once full of direct mail, it's now barren of everything. Many people even pay bills online and don't get paper bills. I'm one of those people.

The key to personalized direct response is to be relevant. You need to know your customer, client or prospect. That takes lots of data. That's something many marketers and hardly any copywriter really delves into.

They tend to throw out a net and catch whatever happens to fall into it. Well, that worked once. It won't work much longer.

The prospect and customer of today wants their offers personalized. He or she wants to know that you understand their needs.

That's why when I go to Amazon, they offer me books and products that I've shown an interest in. They don't show me books on raising children or cleaning house or fixing the car. They show me books about copywriting, marketing, advertising, economics, investing and a host of other subjects I care about. They also show me electronic products they know I care about.

That may be why they were the only online business to show a profit last year. I don't know that to be true. But, you might want to think about it.

Do you personalize your offers? Do you have a landing page for each person or, at the least, each group with one central interest or concern?

Do you send out direct mail to drive traffic to those landing pages? If not, you're throwing profit out the window.

Start now to mine data. Start now to discover the new world of marketing as it is, not as it was.

When you do, you can turn $50,000 into $13 million dollars too!