The Internet offers buyers an almost unlimited choice, and it has never been easier for them to make rational decisions. Nevertheless it’s a mandatory constraint of successful sales teams that you reach out to prospects. In this context the context of how you communicated becomes increasingly important. To not drown in this excessive supply and flood of information, successful companies combine online and offline channels to communicate with customers. Offline marketing is playing a major role in the context of acquiring new customers.
“…58% indicated that lead generation is a key challenge business leaders face.”
Gartner Survey Reveals That CEO Priorities Are Slowly Shifting to Meet Rising Growth Challenges
There’s no alternative to direct marketing for B2B customer acquisition
To build a solid sales pipeline, companies rely on classic sales campaigns as part of B2B customer approach. This results in annoying advertising calls, an abundance of advertising e-mails (which are immediately sent to the spam folder), and cheap printed matter in the mailbox (which gets lost among all the bills and other advertising).
Today, it takes a lot more creativity than this way of communication to get noticed. You’ll only get an annoyed recipient who – if they notice you at all – only perceives you as a nuisance. You thus create a negative emotion. However, you have to try to do precisely the opposite to attract new customers and retain existing customers.
Only about eight percent of decision-makers open from time to time e-mails or printed matter containing advertising information. Even if you breach spam filters and firewalls, it doesn’t mean that your message caught the recipient’s attention. Our subconscious works like a firewall and sorts out in a flash whether a message is important or not. This has become necessary to deal with the overload of digital information and save time. We rely on automated abbreviations and experience to be able to make decisions at lightning speed. In psychology, one speaks of cognitive distortions.
Those cognitive distortions can harm you as an addressor of an advertising message. Or, if you do it right, you can also take advantage of it. It enables you access to the irrational behavior of the customer or prospect, provided you employ an effective communication strategy.
Communication always happens on several levels. For the addressee of your notification to be aware of it, it must convey a corresponding value to be perceived as “important.” Therefore, you have to address the recipient’s subconscious to make sure they automatically rate your message as substantial. The decision-making process assesses the perceived costs, creativity and effort the sender has invested. This happens automatically in the subconscious of the person written to.
“Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.”
Zig Ziglar
How to trigger the subconscious mind with handwritten letters
The British marketing expert Rory Sutherland gets to the point of this automatic selection with the following example. He calls it “costly signaling”:
You receive two different invitations to a wedding for the same date. One will be sent by e-mail and the other by snail-mail. The invitation by mail appears in a high-quality envelope, and the message is handwritten. You automatically assign more importance to the handwritten invitation. The sender spared no time, expense, or effort to send you this message. Even if both contents are roughly the same, you subconsciously assume that you can expect an open bar and high-quality food at the wedding where the invitation was sent by mail. The message you received by e-mail is automatically considered cheap.
That first impression is critical to get a prospect’s attention. A handwritten message surprises the recipient because it sticks out from all the other promotional mailings by e-mail or mail. You signify a particular form of appreciation and show how important it is for you to win the recipient as a customer. Incidentally, such contact also builds trust. It can be assumed that someone who uses this type of creative communication will continue like that during the ongoing business relationship.
Creating Memorable Experiences By Focusing On The Perceived Value
It’s not only the content of a message that is important; the effort someone puts into it is often even higher rated. For example, if you send a letter or a gift to someone by express or use high-quality stationery and use a lovely stamp, it’ll be highly appreciated. Not only do you show your value to the customer, but you can also express your creativity and individuality, which will remain in the recipient’s memory.
Another aspect of a handwritten letter is that you take the recipient away from the digital nuisance and allow them a short break. A quick click isn’t enough to go straight to the message. With this form of message, you address all their senses. How the envelope feels, what the handwriting looks like, how the letter smells, and the sizzling of the paper. All of this ensures a considerably higher memory capacity. It significantly increases your chances of receiving positive feedback from the recipient.
The opening rate of handwritten letters is up to 90%! Besides, advertising letters were written by hand to achieve a response rate of between 10- 40% when acquiring new customers. Provided you consider the success factors. You can get even better numbers with regular customers. Read more about this topic in our blog post “Why handwriting really works in the digital age.”
If you are not happy with your handwriting, our friendly handwriting robots are more than happy to do the work for you. They write the messages in authentic handwriting, error-free and always evenly. To convince yourself of the robots’ handwritten postcards and letters’ high quality and authenticity, request a free sample in our showroom. Check out what our customers say about our handwritten letters and postcards. We ship worldwide via UPS!
