This message from Mike Caruana, the Marketing Director of Lotto Magic, was just posted yesterday in the Lotto Magic back office:
Using Direct Mail to Build Your Lotto Magic Team
Direct mail is a favorite amongst Lotto Magic members, and probably everyone in some sort of home-based business has tried it looking for the holy grail of recruiting. After all, who would resist the temptation of sending out a few letters for the promise of earning a substantial income by doing nothing more?
Unfortunately, too many people try and cut corners and do not know how to begin an effective direct mail campaign. There are also companies like Sears and AOL competing for space in your prospects mailbox and their attention. The tools of the trade, like good lists, are nearly impossible to locate and copyrighters charge a small fortune to develop effective campaigns.
Fortunately, Lotto Magic has been around and we know the tricks and tools of the trade. I personally recruited over 300 people a month into a network marketing opportunity in 1988 using nothing but the US Postal System. Today, these techniques have been refined and made even more powerful with technology to help you build a lucrative business with Lotto Magic.
We used to tell Lotto Magic members everything they needed to know to go out and start an effective campaign. We even have post cards and letters as templates. Since Lotto Magic has to test the techniques before they can be passed on to you, we have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t and what to expect.
In our evolution of providing training, materials, and resources to Lotto Magic members for their direct mail campaigns we have found out several interesting details and have now come to the point where a co-op effort is the most effective technique for building your Lotto Magic business. You will still learn how to do things on your own so you know how the system works, and we used to encourage people to do things on their own, but there are now extremely compelling reasons not to.
First, let’s talk a little bit about mailing lists and response rates.
No doubt you have been bombarded with junk mail and offers of all sorts. You probably have seen flyers for mailing lists as well, some advertising unbelievably dirt-cheap names.
You can spend a fortune on an effective mail piece, but if it is sent out to a garbage list, your response rate will be poor. The most effective people to mail to are those that have spent money on similar offers.
Think about this: If you make a purchase in Fredericks of Hollywood, why do you get Victoria Secret catalogs? If you subscribe to a magazine why are you flooded with offers from other magazines of similar content?
The answer is simple. The big companies that do mailings know that the most responsive customers are those that have purchased similar items.
It stands to reason then that people who have purchased programs on how to make money at home or those that have purchased lottery systems are going to be good prospects for our offer.
Now here’s the secret that no one tells you. These names are a gold mine and sold behind the scenes and the only place to purchase them is from a reputable list broker. A list broker does nothing but host files of lists of people who have responded to different kind of offers. They make their commissions by selling the names to other mailers who want them. They also diligently seed the lists to constantly know what offers are going to what names and which lists are responsive to which offers.
A real list broker will tell you to send them your mail piece and analyze which lists will perform well with it. They will not even sell you names without knowing and approving your mail piece.
Lists you see in magazine and Internet ads are people selling their own names and making their own claims. Many of these names were not generated by selling a product, but from a web form or inquiry, which is completely different and no where near as qualified. Any mailer who has a responsive list of in-house buyers knows full well that the best way to maximize revenue from their list is to make it available exclusively to a list broker and not the general public, and list brokers will not ruin their reputation by representing garbage.
This is why you will never get quality names unless you are buying from a list broker. If you’ve ever wondered why your mailings have flopped, the first question you should ask yourself is where the names came from.
That’s only the first step. The next issue is that list brokers have several lists and each list has a 5,000 name minimum purchase. It is recommended to test your offer against at least 6 lists to begin with it and then add a few new sources to each mailing while dropping those that did not perform in the last mailing.
This poses a problem: The average person cannot mail out 30,000 pieces of mail. Most people are lucky to do 500 to a 1000 in a month.
This is why list brokers do not advertise and you probably have never heard of them until now. They cater to big mailers, who already know how to find them.
If you’re like most people, access to a list broker is out of the question; however, we purchase over 100,000 names per month from our broker and have been granted permission to resell them to Lotto Magic members in much smaller quantities.
The next thing you need to understand is the duplication factor.
We are purchasing over 100,000 names per month from over 40 different sources. Surely there will be duplication amongst these sources, and surely we will be purchasing names from one list that we may have purchased ninety days ago from a different list. There is no avoiding this when dealing with such large quantities, but since the names are a fraction of the mailing cost and all names come to one source point before we mail them or sell them to you, duplicates or people who have already joined Lotto Magic are discarded. This raises our list cost by 30%, but saves a fortune in mailing expenses so it’s worth it.
Chances are, if you were to purchase 500 names from someone else they would not be effective. If you did stumble upon a good source, then chances are a majority of the list has been mailed to.
These two points are compelling reasons to get your names from Lotto Magic. It’s no secret where we buy them from, and any reputable list broker is going to charge $150 per thousand names plus processing fees and fees to deliver the files. When you tack on another 30% because of discarding duplicates, you’re up to $180 per thousand. Lotto Magic charges only $20 more per thousand, and keep in mind we have our own expenses on top of what we have to pay for the names. Yes, you are spending a little bit more, but you are getting quality leads that have been tested and specifically targeted for Lotto Magic offers.
While we are on the subject of mailing lists, please do not fall into the trap of gauging how effective a mailing list is by the number of undeliverable pieces or nixies you receive. You will always receive nixies no matter where you are buying names and the count will always seem higher than it should be. They will also always arrive before your actual responses and further elevate your levels of concern.
If you were to mail out 100 letters, and 10 people expressed interest in your opportunity but 90 were undeliverable, this would be far better than having 5 people interested and only 10 undeliverable. Why? Because the end result in the first scenario is two times as many interested prospects and your cost to do the mailing is the same.
Now, here is the most compelling reason why you not only want to use Lotto Magic lists, but actually have Lotto Magic do the mailing for you, response rates:
Even assuming you can achieve the same response rates as Lotto Magic, here’s a big problem:
If I were to tell you that the Lotto Magic co-ops average 4%, that’s based on large mailings that average 50,000 pieces. So think about this: 2,000 people will express interest out of 50,000, and that’s phenomenal in the direct mail world.
The problem is where do those 2,000 come from out of the 50?
If you’re not mailing the whole file, you will never know.
This means that if you can only mail 500 pieces per month, you will most likely not get 20 prospects each month, as expected. Instead, you may get 50 and then not get any responses for several months. Or it could work to the other extreme. You may mail for 3 or 4 months in a row, receive a low response rate, and then get a surge.
Both the Lotto Magic Direct Mail Co-op and the Lotto Magic Automail Post Card Campaign solve this problem as follows:
Instead of mailing out 500 letters for you, we mail out our entire batch of 50,000 and you are given a share in this co-op with others who are doing the same thing. As responses come back from the mailing, they are distributed to everyone in the co-op in a round robin distribution system. This means everyone will get the same number of leads per share. If the mailing as a whole produces 4%, then you are guaranteed 4%, meaning 20 prospects. If the mailing does extremely well, you also get to reap the benefits of that too.
For that reason alone, you should participate in our co-ops, but here are even more reasons to do so:
- It is highly unlikely you will be able to achieve higher response rates on your own. We are constantly improving our marketing material and constantly testing different lists.
- If you were to use a generic sales piece, results will diminish as you run out of lists and eventually the market will be saturated from everyone mailing the same thing. We have several letters and cards in conjunction with several different lists, tested in many different combinations. You do not need to worry about which ones go with which, because the end result is prospects coming to you!
- Our material is always ready to print and mail. The only waiting period is for updates to the names, which you would have to wait for anyway on your own. Your campaign will get mailed quicker by using our co-op.
- We do not take shortcuts. All material is professionally printed in large volumes, so our pricing is better than what an individual can obtain.
- Fulfillment is quick and prospects will always receive the latest Lotto Magic material. You will never have to worry about stocking material to send to people who respond, or deal with updates to it, since we send out current literature.
- Each mail piece is customized to the recipient. We do not use generic letters or post cards. Our sales letter merges the recipients name and address into the letter and has unique reservation codes so that we know exactly who they are and can track which sources are pulling the best. Our post card response system requires this reservation code as well.
- By combining your efforts with other Lotto Magic members through our co-ops, we all have much more purchasing power and flexibility.
With all of that being said, we never discourage ambition and if you already are using an effective direct mail system to build your organization, then great! If you want to mail on your own, there are some valuable tips in this section and we have post cards you can order. Since generic sales letters have not produced results close enough to our custom letter, we have not released any but you are free to test your own.
If you want the most bang for your buck, our advice is to generate prospects through either of our co-ops and increase your signup conversion by doing your own follow up.