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Small Business Advertising - How Baseball Theme Direct Mail Campaign Hits Home Run

Written by: Jerre Blodgett

Article Overview: It's fun to take a promotional medium, like direct mail, and turn it into a winning campaign. Feel free to use this idea for your business, or create something like it.

Small Business Advertising - How Baseball Theme Direct Mail Campaign Hits Home Run

Here is a promotional campaign concept that I did for one of my clients that blew the doors off of their forecast. The results were about ten times expected. We called it the "Go with the Pros" Campaign. There were three parts to the campaign: First week, we sent a Louisville Slugger baseball bat to 100 best prospects for the company's new machine that had a selling price of about $6,000. Attached to the bat was a small brochure that described the bat as "The Choice of the Pros" - and described it's materials, workmanship, its glorious record of performance and why it was favored by the pro baseball greats for many years. We then described our machine - its materials, workmanship, its terrific capabilities and why we thought it, too, should be the choice of the pros - the pros in this industry.

A week later, we sent a Rawlings baseball glove. Attached was a story about its materials, workmanship and long history of being the Choice of the Pros. That message then flowed into our product message, similar to the first message.

The third week, we sent a Spalding baseball, again with the same theme.

Finally, we had the sales team call each person we had sent the baseball gear to with the goal of setting up a local demonstration of the machine. Almost without exception, they not only took the call, they also wanted and expected a meeting.

Within the next 60 days, the client had machine orders from 18 of the 100 companies. Within the next year, 80 of the hundred bought. Many bought more than one machine.

I called the idea inspiration. My client called it genius.

For more ideas on direct mail promotions, see my other articles about the use of direct mail to build your business.

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Article Tags: baseball bat, baseball gear, baseball greats, brochure, campaign concept, demonstration, direct mail promotions, doors, genius, glorious record, inspiration, louisville slugger, nbsp, pro baseball, product message, prospects, rawlings baseball glove, spalding, strong sales, workmanship



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