Let’s see how much is wasted in the mail.
Letters. Even the pretty notices on company letterhead just don’t get read as much as we would like to think. If the envelope was not hand written it get’s trashed. If we had the time to read of the things that came in the mail our productivity would suffer. I have tried letters and they just don’t work. There is no way to track how many people receive our mail, open our mail, and take action from the direct marketing piece.
Newsletters. We look at newsletters just like we look at newspapers. We read the headlines, ads, and event schedules and put them right into the trash unless it has our name on it. The shelf life of a newsletter has 10 minutes. It takes more time to deliver a newsletter than it does read the newsletter. Thousands of dollars and paper are thrown down the drain.
Magazines.Magazines have pretty pictures but have the shelf life of newsletters and cost 4 times as much. Magazines are great for image building, brand awareness, but can drain a budget faster than any other form of media.
The solution…
Effective email marketing.The difference between email marketing and effective email marketing is that effective email marketing allows you to track what people are reading. Send out mass emails that are personalized, loaded full of links, and have less words. See www.Icontact.com for a good email marketing software.
Blogs.The new media that is trackable, scalable, and profitable. Take all of your content you put in a newsletter and add it to your blog. Find multiple authors who are are good writers who can commit an hour a week to posting to the blog. Chances are the content is already written in an email or the print newsletter. Just copy and paste to the blog. This extra effort pays off. Maximize the RSS functionality and educate your membership or audience how to subscribe by email or in a RSS reader. www.WordPress.com is my favorite.
Video casting.Headline events demand multimedia formats. Host interviews with important authorities on hot topics and allow your members to subscribe to receiving videos by RSS. Create your own FREE real estate television channel. You may already own a digital video camera but if not then www.FlipVideo.com is my favorite. www.YouTube.com, www.Viddler.com, and www.ScreenCast.com are good alternatives for video hosting.
Stop printing, start linking
Give chips not paper clips
Go digital, not traditional
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