How to Flop in Direct Mail and Mail Order
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How to Flop in Direct Mail and Mail Order
Most mail order and direct mail businesses fail. I’m going from my own experience, most of mine have failed. You can fail a lot faster if you know what you are doing. Then you can work out that new idea of yours and get rich. Here are some good ways to fail:
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Rely on Other People More than You Rely on Yourself
You can do this in different ways.
1. Have your suppliers drop ship to your customers. Some suppliers are okay. Others are not. Choose one that steals your customer’s names and then sends them all kinds of offers, cutting you out of the picture. Think that only the first sale is important and not the subsequent orders that are not coming to you.
2. Find a supplier that gives you less than a 50% discount. He will make money, you won’t. That’s what you want, right?
3. Find a supplier that takes your money but doesn’t ship (or ships some piece of junk from his scrap pile).
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4. Never write your own books, make your own products, or get an exclusive from a supplier.
Don’t Spend Money to Make Money
Again, you can do this by:
1. Not buying advertising.
2. Not spending money to improve your operations.
3. Not buying professional printing.
Don’t Test Your Ads or Track Your Customer Response
Do this by:
1. Sending an ad to Fishing World advertising your new knitting kit.
2. Sending an ad to Popular World Women thinking that your ad for jackhammers will result in sales to 100 of their 10 million readers. (Always believe your statistics.)
3. Buying ad space in 12 issues of Sucker World thinking that the discount for buying more than one issue at a time will guarantee you profits.
4. Never tracking an ad. Don’t worry about recovering your advertising cost. Never ask for shipping and handling.
5. Once your classified ad is humming, don’t ever buy more costly display ads.
6. Always assume that the mailing list you purchased from www.AncientNames.com will bring you no less than a 10% return. For gosh sakes, never use a reliable list broker.
7. Never hire a professional copywriter nor study copywriting if you write your own stuff. And never copyright your printed material.
Don’t Carefully Consider Customer Complaints or Give Refunds
Crabby customers can help you ruin your business. The simple rule is: The Customer is Always Wrong.
Oh, one last thing. Never talk to accountants, lawyers, bankers, or other business people.
Don’t forget to keep postage and mailing cost as high as possible.
Well, that should get you started.
John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine. He calls himself “Taylor Jones, the hack writer.”
More info: http://www.tjbooks.com
Business web site: http://www.dumbincome.com
Keywords assigned to this article by MoneyMoz: Mail order, direct mail, copywriting, mailing list, business failure, home business, part-time busin
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