direct mail wrong number

Marketing Monday: Sorry, Wrong Number

Scott Costello All, Blog, Marketing 3 Comments

direct mail wrong numberMy partner and I are adjusting are mailing approach a little bit to put his contact information on the letters instead of mine since he is handling pretty much all the phone calls.  We want to make sure that we pick up the phone when someone calls instead of letting it go to voice mail and giving them a call back later.  The caller is never more motivated then when they are calling.

As part of my partners contact information we created a new google voice phone number and used that on the mailers.  There were 35 letters in the first batch that went out with the new number and suddenly the phone went silent.  Normally we get 11% response rate, which would mean we should have gotten 4 calls.  We got none!?  Hmmm there must be a reason.

My first thought was that I messed up the delivery address like I did one time in the past.  That was not it because I did not get one return to sender envelope.  I then had this sinking feeling that I messed up our new phone number on the mailing piece.  After a quick check, I noticed I accidentally used 3966 instead of 3866 in the last part of the number…..MOTHER F****R!!!!

Sorry, I apologize for swearing but it’s not good to suppress.  Now that I’ve let my frustration out it’s time to move on and fix the problem.  We decided to send out a quick follow up letter to these out of state owners to apologize for the miss-information and to give them our correct phone number.

Maybe this will actually work out in our favor.  I know for a fact that a lot of internet marketers use a similar tactic when sending out emails.  They’ll send you a marketing email with a link to some video that contains the  “secret sauce”, only with a broken link.  They will then follow that email up the next day with another email apologizing for the bad link and supplying you with a good link.  I’ve seen it so much that it must be working for them.

What do you all do when you make a mistake on one of your marketing pieces?

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Comments 3

  1. Oops. That’s a bummer. But like you said, maybe it will work out better for you. I’d love to hear a follow-up to find out whether your results with the second mailing are better, worse, or the same as your usual results.

    If I had made this mistake, I would do the same thing you are doing. You already have part of the marketing message out there – you might as well tack on another piece and see what happens, right?

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