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Every time you mail an existing or potential customer a letter and ask them to respond or take action, you are running a direct-mail campaign. Direct mail is a marketing strategy that can help you achieve a number of business objectives. From lead generation to customer retention, direct mail campaigns are a highly versatile and relatively cost-effective choice for business promotion.

So you’re convinced your business – and your customers – would benefit from a strong guarantee. Now what? What are you going to guarantee? How are you going to position it? Once again, this goes back to your target audience and your product or service. What are some of the major objections your potential customers raise during the sales process? What kind of risk do they take on when they make a purchase? How much time will they need to test or experience your product or service?

What is the biggest objection you need to overcome when closing a sale? Is it cost? Belief in what you have to say? Confidence in your product or service? While it is a different answer for every business, every business has to deal with some element of customer fear or hesitation before a monetary transaction.

Before you try to offer something, it is important to decide what kind of offer will most effectively achieve your objectives. Are you trying to generate leads, convert customers, build a database, move old product off the shelves, or increase sales? Consider what type of offer will be of most value to your ideal customers – what offer will make them act quickly.

Here are some examples of types of offers for prospective clients: 

Your offer is the foundation of your marketing campaign. Get it right, and everything else will fall into place. Your headline will grab readers, your copy will sing, your ad layout will hardly matter, and you will have customers running to your door. Get it wrong, and even the best looking, best-written campaign will sink like the Titanic. 

A powerful offer is an irresistible offer. It’s an offer that gets your audience frothing at the mouth and clamoring over each other all the way to your door. An offer that makes your readers pick up the phone and open their wallets. Irresistible offers make your potential customers think, “I’d be crazy not to take him up on that,” or “An offer like this doesn’t come around very often.” They instill a sense of emotion, of desire, and ultimately, urgency.

Hopefully by now you have figured out -- or started to think about -- who will be doing your types I - IV copy. But before you decide exactly who will write for you, you first need to decide WHAT needs to be written and its TYPE of copy. Frankly, even thinking about the different types of copy is even more important than who will actually write it because once you DEFINE the ROLE, it is easy to assign the role to the most adept person. In classic business administration, you can have multiple humans in a role and you can have multiple roles in a human.