How to Write Electronic Direct Mailers

Lucep has recently added some exciting new features, as a result of which we’re doing some experimentation with EDM campaigns. In this post, I’m going to share this experience on how to write electronic direct mailers that will give you an instant response by email, via social media, or even on the phone.

This is what you will see in the tips below. These are six ways to improve insurance customer experience that show a prospective buyer the way forward towards their desired product.

There are three phases to this campaign before you even create the content for the mailers. One is to create a mailing list of relevant leads, or groups of leads. Each of these groups should be one of your ideal customer personas. The second is to find more information, as much as you can, about each and every lead in your mailing list. The third is to create EDM templates for each group, based on their industry, the purpose of the mail, and their typical likes and preferences.

Then you write the personalized letters that will be sent to each group, and the followups needed to nurture them through from discovery to purchase.

Creating your mailing list groups

We’ve been doing mailers for some time now, but the only list that had some semblance of order was the one we sent to customers who had already signed up for a free trial, moving them from signup to active user and then to a paying customer.

But then, we kick-started three separate EDM campaigns with different approaches. One is because we started getting inquiries from specific verticals such as financial services, after using testimonials from customers in this vertical.

The second is because we started using traffic analytics tools to get targeted information about the companies that are visiting our website. That’s highly actionable data for a B2B customer engagement company, and we have put together EDM templates to reach out to them while the lead is still fresh.

The third is because we can now automate lead generation from social media. Our process for this social pipeline moves leads straight from Twitter to your CRM and from Facebook directly to your phone. So we’re actually getting leads from social media, instead of just buzz and some clicks.

The point is that you need to create targeted mailing lists of leads based on the source (that works for you) and existing customers (so that you can showcase testimonials), and have a standard EDM template for instant response to any lead that shows up. These are just some ideas we’re working on. You could have distinct electronic direct mailer templates and designs created for every channel you are on.

EDM tools, templates and designs

These are the resources we made use of to populate the mailing lists with relevant leads, collect data on the leads, and create the mailers for our EDM campaigns.

1. EDMdesigner email editor.

2. Canva email header design.

3. Lucep EDM, FaceBook and web forms plugins.

4. Zapier for integrating Twitter with your CRM.

5. Mailchimp email design reference and campaign designer.

6. Leadworx to learn which companies are visiting your website.

6. Findthatlead to add contact details for a company, or list of companies.

These are also some free templates from EDMDesigner which you can make use directly in your mailers, or as the basis to create your own custom designs.

Writing personalized letters for an EDM campaign

Having done all this, you have a neat looking electronic direct mailer and a mailing list of potential leads. Now all you have to do is write the content for the emails. You can write personalized letters to every person in the list individually, but that would become way too much work if you’re sending thousands of mails (which is what is needed in email marketing given the attrition that happens from your mail server to delivery, the open rate, and then the click rate.).

So you need to make use of email writing tools to create the perception of personalization at scale. Here are a few suggestions that we have found extremely useful:

1. The title should be about them and what they need, not you or your product. If the recipient doesn’t know who you are, then they’re not going to click on “Lucep – the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.” What will make a bank’s Customer Care Head pick it out of a big list of unread emails is something like this – “How this bank increased customer satisfaction by 67%” or even name the customer to make the title even more personal.

Since I know that someone at this bank visited Lucep and is interested in sales playbook tools, we had an opportunity to pitch the bank. We found out that Ed is the Head of Sales at this bank, his phone number, email, twitter and LinkedIn contact details. Now it’s a relevant lead that’s been entered into our list of website leads, and the standard EDM is going out to Ed.

2. Make use of the |*FNAME| merge tag in Mailchimp instead of personalizing each email or mass mailing without personalization. Dear |*FNAME| becomes Dear Ed, and that’s a good start to make him read the rest of the mail.

So what you have so far is this:

——————————

Subject line: How this bank increased customer satisfaction by 67%

Dear Ed.

Here’s a cheat sheet of the most commonly used merge tags that can extract data from the mailing list fields and add it to your email, to make it look like it’s personalized.

*|FNAME|*

*|LNAME|*

*|EMAIL|*

*|PHONE|*

*|ADDRESS|*

3. Your call to action. It is, after all, the reason why you are doing all this, including reading this rather lengthy blog post. What is the best CTA in an email? The click rate, if you include a link, is bad enough. But then there has to be a conversion after the email recipient lands on your website. That makes the overall conversion rate (emails sent to leads converted) a very small percentage.

The same applies to phone numbers. You just can’t get people to call you by putting your number into an email.

This is where the Lucep EDM plugin is your Christmas gift come early. Let’s say I’ve sent you this article as an email, and I know your name (Ed) and phone number (+011234567890). Now the CTA is:

Ed – Let’s move this discussion to the phone. Can I call you? Click here.

On MailChimp, the personalized URL is created like this, using the merge tags discussed above.

http://start.lucep.com/call-me-back?name=*|FNAME|*&tel=*|PHONE|*&utm_campaign=EDMblog&utm_source=mailchimp&medium=email

Want to see it in action? Subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll send you a sublimely beautiful and personalized newsletter with a CTA that has a massive click to lead conversion rate.