How to Create a Mail Order Business that Can Make Over $1 Million Even With a 0% Response

Once you have your product in stores you have another opportunity that most businesses don’t know about and don’t take advantage of. You can do this with your own product, or if you don’t have a product yet, do this as a joint venture with a company who does have a product in stores.

The Secret:

The big secret is to print on parts of the packaging where nothing is printed right now. Because the packaging is already going through the printing press when it’s printed, the cost to print on the unprinted areas is usually nothing. (If one side of the package is not printed at all and you want to print on that side, then there might be a small charge).

If You Do Not Have A Product Yet:

Go to some stores and find products that sell in large quantities and look closely at their packaging. (The products that sell in the big quantities are usually the inexpensive ones). The areas you can see before opening the product are probably all printed, so open the package and look for areas with no printing.

This is your opportunity.

Next, come up with an idea for a product that has a high perceived value that you can provide for very little cost. An information product is ideal because the perceived value is high and the cost either low or nothing if delivered electronically by email or web site.

Make sure the product you are offering is a logical tie in with the product in the package and that it is something not available in stores so it will not be viewed as taking business away from the retailer.

If you can deliver the product free electronically, approach the company and offer to provide your product to their customers for free. Make sure whatever you provide ties in with their product or even involves their product itself.

If there is a cost, make it a mail in offer, email offer or web site offer. Ideally you want a free offer with a $1.00 charge for postage and handling. This way you can still say it’s free. Plan it so that you can mail the product with a postage cost, product cost, labor cost and your special offer insert cost totaling less than $1.00.

As long as you keep your fulfillment cost at or under $1.00, you have accomplished mailing out your "bounce-back" offer for free. You have made money even if no one orders from your offer!

Most companies selling through retail stores do not have the names of their end customers to market to. This technique will allow you to build a database of their customers which can be invaluable for future promotions, surveys or market research.

Because your customers are in a good mood when they receive your product, they are more likely to order then than at almost any other time. My mail order company coded every mailing we ever did to track response, and the code "BB" (for bounce-back offer inserted in all product shipments) performed better than hundreds of our other mailings.

You can start a business this way for no money and only a little time and creativity.

If You Do Have A Product

If you have your own product, it’s even easier. You don’t have to convince anyone else that you have a good deal for them, just do it!

With your own product, everything mentioned above still applies, but you also have an additional opportunity. You can use the special offer as a promotion to sell more of your product in stores.

Do this by flagging your offer on the front or back of the packaging.

Warning: Retail store managers and buyers do not like you to do anything with your packaging that could take sales away from the store. Be careful how you structure your offer - especially if it appears on the outside of the package.

Another technique you can use is to raise the price of your special offer (along with increasing the value of what they get) and give your customers $1.00 off for each UPC code symbol from your product they send in with the order form.

This way, your promotion is welcomed by the buyer because it is perceived as a way to help the store sell more of your product.

If you do this wrong, a major chain can, and will, commonly refuse to buy your product until you fix it!

It is also important that the product you are offering in your special offer is different and not directly comparable to the product being sold in the store. You do not want to devalue the product in the store by selling the same product cheaper.

Make sure the buyer considers your special offer a helpful promotion to move more of your product through his stores and not a way for you to build another business using his distribution. I’ve actually had buyers tell me they didn’t want me to use the distribution through their stores to build another business for myself. They feel that promotions should be used to move product through their stores only.

These concepts will be easier to understand with a few actual examples from my businesses...

Case History # 1:

When we were selling kids stickers to gift stores and mass merchants in the mid 1980’s, we had a small package of stickers that sold at retail for $1.00. On the back of the package we printed a mail in offer for an assortment of 20 - 30 small bulk stickers for free - with a $1.00 charge for postage and handling.

We were able to send out the stickers and a small mini-catalog to them to buy more for less than $1.00 so we made money even if no one ordered from the mini-catalog.

But they did order... A lot.

We frequently got $2.00, $3.00 and $4.00 asking for multiples of our free offer. And they ordered from the catalog too. At the high point, we had $5,000 - $6,000 coming in each month just from the $1.00 offers alone.

This promotion became the start of a new mail order business that eventually grew to over $1 million and we sold the business for over $1 million as well - all created from a promotion that was free!

Note that printing that notice under the stickers cost nothing because we were printing that side of the card already so all we did is set up the art for the card to print the offer in the white space under the stickers.

We experimented with many different price points and different copy for the offer.

Case History # 2:

About 5 years later I had the opportunity with another one of my companies to do another sticker product line. This time the packages were larger and there was a 4" x 6" unprinted area under the stickers themselves in the package.

These packages were the same size as those you see in a Hallmark display (not an accident - we designed them to fit on Hallmark’s displays in addition to our own).

I was talking with the Wal-Mart buyer about our products and he opened the package and noticed the promotion I had underneath the stickers. I was very nervous as I had forgotten to mention it to him...

But, because I had structured it right, offering a $1.00 discount on the mail in offer for each UPC code sent in, he loved it. Not only did he approve it, he requested we add a starburst on the package to alert the consumer to the promotion.

The mail in offer this time was for 150 small stickers - a totally different format than the 4" x 6" sheets that were in the package. The cost was $8.50 - $10.50 and the consumer could mail in up to 3 UPC codes for each offer. What this meant is that if the consumer liked the offer, they could buy 3 packages of stickers in the store and get all their money back when they ordered the promotion.

This is why the buyer loved it. It was a guaranteed way to sell more product for the retailer and the mail in offer was for something (150 loose 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" stickers) that could not possibly be a product in his stores.

Case History # 3:

A case of "not invented here". After I sold my mail order company to a larger competitor, I was a part time consultant to them for 3 years as a part of the deal.

This company was about 10 times our size and was selling about 400 million to 500 million stickers each year on rolls (not individually packaged) to medical and dental offices.

I had helped them reduce the cost of printing their stickers because I had developed and used less costly printing methods than they did. One of my suggestions to them was to print on the back of the release liner of the stickers themselves. This could be done for only the cost of the ink due to the huge volumes they printed. For all practical purposes, the cost was so small as to be insignificant.

Since they already had a web site, what I wanted to print on the backs of the sticker liners were that there were special free offers for kids at their web site and give the web address. At the web site they could have offers like the "send $1.00" one I did so successfully before.

They were afraid of the traffic that might cause so they didn’t do it. Just think, wouldn’t you like to have 500 million little ads offering something free in the hands of your target market with no wasted circulation?

Not only would it be 500 million FREE impressions each year and millions of web site visitors, every ad would be seen by the kids you were trying to reach because the medical offices only hand out the stickers to kids.

Talk about being able to set up a new business for free - how would you like to start a new business with 500 million annual impressions made to the exact people in their target market with no wasted circulation - for FREE? Sometimes an idea can be really good but the other party cannot see the opportunity no matter what you do.

If you would like help structuring one of these deals for you or a business you want to set up a joint venture with, give me a call now. I offer consulting and coaching and have set up many of these types of promotions.

For More Information Contact:

Joe McVoy
Profitable Marketing Systems, LLC
1100 Nautilus Court
Lafayette, CO 80026
Web: www.ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Email: Joe@ProfitableMarketingSystems.com
Phone: (720) 890-8760
Fax: (303) 604-6839