Sales Engine: Delivering Precisely Tuned Sales Funnels With Direct Mail Automation

We’ve been working with Justin Queen and his team of marketing engineers at Sales Engine for a while now, and we’ve seen explosive growth in his use of the Postalytics Agency Edition, especially of our Triggered Drip Campaigns.

When we spoke with Justin and learned about how he’s turned the traditional agency model on its ear and is deploying Postalytics direct mail as a key part of a highly tuned performance marketing funnel, we knew we had to interview him for our Thought Leadership Series.

Justin & Team Deliver Customers With Cost Certainty

Justin and the Sales Engine team are incredibly successful in delivering highly qualified leads with absolute cost certainty to their small business, owner/operator clients.

They’ve finely tuned a model of targeting very specific leads with proprietary data & algorithms, and of course with Postalytics as a key component. Read/watch on for more on how this fascinating agency conducts their magic.

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Jump To Quick Hits Of The Interview

What’s A Sales Engine?

Proprietary Data & Algorthims

What’s A Marketing Engineer?

Why Did Sales Engine Pick Postalytics To Automate Direct Mail?

A Sales Engine Customer Success Story

How Justin Sells Direct Mail Like A Digital Channel

In Direct Mail, Timing Is Everything

Dennis Kelly:

Hello, everybody. This is Dennis Kelly from Postalytics, and today we are interviewing Justin Queen of Sales Engine. Justin is a Postalytics Agency Edition customer and he’s doing some really innovative stuff.

He’s got a very different approach to small business marketing and sales. And so, we’re thrilled to have you here today, Justin, and welcome to our video/blog interview series.

Justin Queen:

Well, thank you, Dennis. I appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Dennis Kelly:

Psyched to have you. As everybody may see, we are recording this in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, so we are recording from our respective home offices. Excuse any background noise or distracting photos and things that I have in my background anyway. So, Justin, I would love to have you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself, where are you located and your background and how you got to where you are today?

Justin Queen:

Absolutely, so we’re located in Wilmington, North Carolina. We’re here on the coast and my background has always been in sales and marketing. I’ve always been an entrepreneur since I was 22. Our company has existed in different forms now since 2004, but we started really specializing in lead generation for the home developments and building industry, community development building industry.

And then after the last downturn, as we kind of diversified industries, we started to think about what can we do to kind of break away from anything that resembles the traditional agency model and provide more certainty to owner-operators.

What’s A Sales Engine?

Justin Queen:

So basically, they have a sales and marketing system that they can utilize to really understand what it’s costing them to get every customer through the door and then what they need to do to dial that up and down to increase their profitability and ultimately, get to a place where they have the profitability to always be working on the business instead of in the business. Because once you can work on the business, you make a lot more money than when you work in the business.

Justin Queen:

And so, what Sales Engine really was created to do is really to provide a very high level of sales and marketing intelligence for the owner-operators of a lot of different small business industries and give them the ability to have those levers to pull that their competitors won’t have. Their competitors will be making broad-brush decisions, kind of looking over their shoulder trying to figure out what’s going on.

Then, we get into challenging times. Right now, our customers would be able to say, “Okay, we need to do X, Y, and Z and get our cost per customer down to exactly where it needs to be to gain our profitability back,” and now they’re not worried and they’re cruising right through it.

Sales Engine Delivers Customers For Exact Costs

Dennis Kelly:

That’s great. So, it sounds like there’s been really an evolution over time where you’ve learned a lot and you’ve taken a more traditional model and you really cranked it down to something really specific. Tell us about what type of customer you just serve. It sounds like you’re selling to the owner-operator. I’d love to learn more about the types of businesses that you are helping.

Justin Queen:

So, we’ve been trying to find the right category to really classify what kinds of businesses that we work in. And now, the world has kind of done that for us. It turns out it’s essential businesses and what that means is there are businesses that are necessary high-demand businesses that people are going to be in need of and so that takes a lot of different forms.

Justin Queen:

We work in a lot of home service industries where we have prebuilt marketing and sales models that to an 80% degree of certainty will get you into a place where we can help you hone in on exactly how to spend your marketing money to get customers walked in the door for a specific cost every single time.

And so those industries in home service look like moving companies, roofing companies, pool companies, septic companies, HVAC companies that kind of runs the gamut.

We also work with oral surgeons, people who are doing high-value oral surgeries, all the way to people or companies that are doing computer repair and phone repair and stuff like that and then we’ve also done some different work in the legal space.

But any business that books business over the phone consistently to try to get onsite appointments or to try to create opportunities.

I just thought of another home service industry like blinds and home organization.

Analyzing Inbound Phone Calls To Determine Lead Quality

Justin Queen:

Those types of businesses that have a showroom, but still need to do a lot of commerce selling over the phone, we can work with because we record every single phone call.

We have people that go through those phone calls and qualify.

We drew in this many leads and that’s great, but how many of them were actually qualified to buy from us? And then what did it cost us to get that number of people?

And then based on our close rate, what does that look like as far as what it’s costing us to getting customers, et cetera.

And so, any business where we can easily do that is usually a good business for us.

Dennis Kelly:

That’s great. Well, it sounds like you’re really servicing local businesses, that operate within a geographic area.

Is there a geographic element to your reach as a business or can you service these types of customers anywhere in the country?

Justin Queen:

Well, we service customers anywhere in the country. There isn’t any geographic confinement. For most of our customers, they do have a geographic service area and we’ve spent four or five years creating a lot of technology to give them tools that their competitors wouldn’t have.

Proprietary Data For Postalytics Direct Mail & Algorithms For Paid Search

One thing we’ve done in partnering with Postalytics is making sure we can harvest data in a way that their competitors can’t get.

So the data that dumps into Postalytics that sends out direct mail is not immediately available to everybody else. Just our customer. We built our own proprietary algorithms that make paid search do things and save money in a way that wouldn’t be available to other companies and the same thing with video marketing and some other advertising avenues.

Sales Engine Clients Get Geographic Exclusivity

Justin Queen:

So, what we do is we give our customers exclusivity on their geographic area so they can enjoy the full advantage of the things that we bring to the table.

As limiting as that might seem, we can work with 20 to 30 companies, in different industries, in one service area as long as we serve as their industry, so it’s really not that limiting for us. That way we can be on team whatever and really give them the full advantage.

Our model digs into your CRM, digs intimately into your business and we can have that level of transparency and trust with them without them having to worry about us selling the same thing to the other guy down the street.

Which is pretty much what all the media companies do, so it is a real strategic solution where they can feel like we are a hundred percent on their team.

What’s A Marketing Engineer?

Dennis Kelly:

I have to imagine that, in speaking to the owner-operator, that really drills into the most important things that they’re worried about.

One of the things I picked up on your website that I thought was really kind of new and innovative is that you have employees that work for your clients that are referred to as marketing engineers.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and what they do and why you’ve given them that title?

Justin Queen:

Well, it’s interesting because usually in the ad industry, those people are called account executives and their job is just to facilitate communication, keep things running, manage budgets and stuff like that.

The marketing engineer’s job is different in that we’ve created a lot of automation to eliminate functional roles in our company to reduce overhead.

So our customers don’t have to pay gazillions of dollars to buy our service, but also to make sure we could compensate marketing engineers better than our industry to find the very best people at strategy.

Justin Queen:

And so, the reason we call them marketing engineers is because if we have a sales engine built for the landscape design industry and that Sales Engine’s job is to get that company $150,000 landscape projects from an affluent customer.

The sales engine gets everything about 80% there, the marketing engineer’s job, based on the training we give them, is to get that extra 20% and create the strategy needed for the customer to connect those two dots and to get the automation and artificial intelligence that we use kind of dialed in and working.

Their job is to engineer those results every month to get the amount of leads they need, to get the cost per lead where it needs to be and to monitor the customer’s close rate with them.

Marketing Engineers Deliver Leads With Cost Certainty & Analyze Close Rates

Justin Queen:

So we’re making sure we’re bringing in customers for the exact cost because you can know how many leads you need and you can know exactly what you need to be paying for them.

But if you’re close rate drops, unless you get more leads, your cost per customer is going to go up. Why? Because if your close rate drops, now you need more leads to get the same amount of customers.

So all of these little odometers move around based on the market conditions to impact what you’re actually paying. And if you know those numbers as an owner-operator, you can make adjustments with very little worry. I would say very little worried, but a lot less worry than other people.

Justin Queen:

A lot of people kind of operate in the, “I don’t really know what’s happening with my marketing, but I know some of it’s working.”

We try to get people into a place where they know, to an approximated amount, exactly what’s working.

It’s like, “Okay, now we just need to cut back a little on this and add a little more of that and now we’re there,” and they have that sense of certainty and the marketing engineer’s job is to give them that information and to make sure that they know which lever to pull when it’s time to pull it.

Sales Engine Delivers Outcomes For Small Business Owners

Dennis Kelly:

So, you’ve really built a highly automated process that is configured by these marketing engineers to produce the desired results and to provide clarity to a business owner on the most important metrics in their funnel, right?

How many leads you’re getting? How much does it cost? What does the conversion rate look like?

At the end of the day, a business owner doesn’t care about marketing versus sales, right? It’s just their business and they need to focus on executing that business, not worrying about all the delineations that we tend to come up with as marketing and salespeople over time.

Justin Queen:

They just want outcomes.

And so I say, sometimes, our job is to deliver outcomes. That’s what you hire us for.

If we’re not delivering outcomes, then we’re fired because that’s our job and so nothing else matters. It doesn’t matter how many impressions you got or any of that other stuff. And we try to stay away from metrics that don’t matter and really focus on the ones that do because, at the end of the day, all of those metrics are just a means to the end of getting to everything you just talked about.

Postalytics Automates The Direct Mail Back End

Justin Queen:

We don’t automate strategy. And so, that way we can have smart people focused more on strategy instead of just doing stuff that’s very functional.

That’s where Postalytics comes into play. It’s like we’re in a time where it doesn’t make sense anymore to get on a printing website and print out 10,000 postcards and have them in your office and now you’ve got to import all the data and do a mail merge and now you got to have somebody put all the labels on this stuff.

It makes absolutely no sense and so we’ve automated the process of harvesting the data and getting it to Postalytics.

And now, every day, without anybody touching it, but somebody monitoring it, you have direct mail going out to the right people in a very timed sense, it’s personalized, and the marketing engineer just has to make sure the results are happening and the strategy is correct.

And that’s the way we really feel like it should be done because if 70% of your resources, like other parts of the advertising industry are focused on just getting the work done, we kind of feel like that’s a missed opportunity.

Dennis Kelly:

Well, thanks for touching on that. We really started Postalytics because we thought there was a tremendous amount of friction in the direct mail production world. And so, the process of executing on a traditional direct mail campaign is time-consuming and involves a lot of moving parts.

There are a lot of people involved. There’s printers involved. There are marketers involved. The postal service is involved. There’s a lot of moving parts and we thought what if we could build software that could make the production and management of direct mail campaign look and act and feel more like email and just simplify the entire thing.

Why Did Sales Engine Pick Postalytics?

Dennis Kelly:

And so, what it sounds like is that the primary value you see in Postalytics is the friction reduction that we’re able to provide. How’d you find out about Postalytics? I’m just curious. How did you learn about us?

Justin Queen:

It was interesting because we were in the process of trying to figure out how to automate direct mail.

And we were actually talking to a mover in Arizona and he was kind of going through some stuff. I don’t know if he’s still doing it because a lot of guys were … They had a lot of success with Postalytics, but they had to be working on the business enough to import the data.

So that’s part of the reason why we were trying to automate it because they were still having to do a lot of work. He’s like, “Man.” He goes, “I’ve used this company Postalytics And it’s just so much easier than doing the local yokel thing.”

I checked you guys out and you completely developed that entire leg we were looking for.

Not only that, but you had the dashboard and you could actually show a JPEG preview of every piece that was going out.

I’m like, “That’s perfect,” because if that had not existed, we would have had to try to build that and who knows how much that would’ve cost or if that was even practical. So you guys just completely solved …

Dennis Kelly:

It costs a lot. I can tell you that.

Justin Queen:

So I’m like, “Man, we don’t have to worry about mail houses. This is perfect,” and then we were able to kind of automate, so now our customer can wake up in the morning and just see what went out. They don’t have to buy any lists. They don’t have to do anything.

And if they need to change their price points or anything, just to let their marketing engineer know and that’s done whereas the process used to be you had to call your local guy, Larry.

No offense, anybody named Larry, but then you had to get to know Larry, Larry wanted to take you out to coffee and now you had to call Larry and Larry had to price everything out.and it had to be this email back. It was this huge process, just like you’re talking about.

A Better Alternative Than Every Day Direct Mail

Justin Queen:

And the only alternative to that was these big direct mail companies where they do everyday direct mail and they sold it more like a media package.

And so the reps weren’t really invested in the results so much, and so it was like, man, here’s this completely pre-built solution available to us. And we’re like, “Man, we will do this all day long.”

Justin Queen:

So now, all we had to build out was the technology needed to get the data we needed and that also cost a lot, but we got that done.

So you helped me only have to worry about that part, but we got that part done and now we just have to handshake, which we can do in a very customized way and Postalytics has been great.

How A Sales Engine Drives Revenue For Moving Companies

Dennis Kelly:

Great, great. Well, I appreciate that very much. I’d love to talk a little bit about maybe one of your clients where you’ve installed one of your sales funnels. I almost think of it as an installation, right?

Where you create a sales engine for a client and direct mail is part of that, but there’s a lot of other stuff happening.

I’d love for you to just talk through a client example and talk about some of the successes that you’ve seen with clients.

Justin Queen:

The best examples, I mean, one of the industries that gets the absolute best ROI on direct mail is the moving industry.

And so if we just take a local example, Big G Movers. I know the owner pretty well and they were one of our first moving customers.

Basically, we are able to leverage the timing on when people move. Once their home goes on the market, we have automation that harvests that data.

And literally, if your home goes on the market today, tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, there’s going to be a mailer going out through Postalytics completely personalized to your family and your situation and that’s like, Queen family … Queen is my last name, you got to move and so now that’s a mid-funnel strategy.

Justin Queen:

And we now know that you’ve got to move. And so the question is are you going to use a mover or not, so successful marketing is a game of probability.

Everything you can do to narrow the profitability is good and then you use the price points of the homes to really hone in on your ideal customer or average move that you’re looking for.

Also, when your home now goes under contract, now you’re going to close in about 30 to 50 days.

So now more urgently than ever, you’ve got to start making that decision. And for a couple of dollars, you can start creating that mid-funnel awareness in a way you don’t even have to touch anything.

It just happens automatically, and for the moving industry, that’s one of the highest ROI strategies you can utilize. It drives hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue over time because of that.

There will eventually be more, but there’s not a lot of competitors using direct mail because of the time commitment involved. And so, because we’ve been able to automate the process and make it a hundred percent hands-off, which I think we’re the only ones that have made it a hundred percent …

There are some companies where you can get lists and where you can push some buttons and send it out, but to have it a hundred percent automated is something we’ve only been able to do so far.

So since that’s the case, it creates a strategic advantage for the customer. And so it either gets their period or gets there faster and creates, basically, a first-at-bat opportunity for them.

Dennis Kelly:

That’s great and that’s where you want to be. You want to be talking to them first and as you pointed out, it’s all about timing.

How To Sell Direct Mail As A Digital Marketing Channel – Not A Media Product

Dennis Kelly:

You touched on one thing that I thought was a pretty interesting. You mentioned that often direct mail is pitched as more like a media product and the way that you’re talking about it, it’s very much more of a digital marketing type of an approach.

It sounds a heck of a lot more like somebody pitching a Google ad campaign than a traditional media campaign.

I’m just curious, what are some of the challenges that you have seen out there in terms of presenting direct mail automation but your entire approach and how did you arrive at the way that you’ve packaged things up and the way that you sell them?

Justin Queen:

Now, it’s sold as part of a proven solution, so it’s already been piloted as part of an industry and its work, so that’s helpful.

But I think one of the biggest things that we combat with any media and an owner-operator is really just their preconceived notion about something.

We call it head trash. You’ve got head trash from prior experience. And typically, it’s from something 10 years ago that was done either in its infancy or by somebody that did it improperly.

So the thing is most of the time when we explain the way we do things, we don’t have a lot of pushback except for people that have really been burned and they have some head trash.

And so, the thing that’s tough about direct mail is it used to be really inundated before the great recession. Just direct mail was everywhere.

And then the great recession happened and leveled a lot of media and direct mail was one of them.

Then, it had an opportunity to kind of reinvent itself and come back, so there’s still a lot of mass mail stuff going on, but that is still the most ineffective way to do it.

And the interesting thing about Postalytics is it allows you to take amazing control in an on-demand way and make direct mail do things it’s never done before.

In Direct Mail – Timing Is Everything

Justin Queen:

When you get the timing element right, when somebody is moving through a buying process and you are aware that they’re becoming in-market for your products and services and you can time direct mail correctly, suddenly the probability of success just skyrockets.

So now you just have to hit an entire neighborhood to find less than 3% of the people that might be interested in putting in a pool and you had to absorb … just kind of with TV or anything else, you had to absorb all the waste in that group to get to that one or two guys.

Justin Queen:

As media got more saturated and diluted, those numbers got worse and worse and worse as far as conversion rates.

And so every door direct mail didn’t work like it used to because now people had all this stuff stuffed in their inbox and none of it was personalized and you may have a less than 1% chance of buying.

Whereas now I could send something directly to your house and say, “Hey, Dennis. The Kelly family needs to enjoy their backyard better than ever before. We know you’re looking at X, Y, and Z. Check this out,”

The impact of that will grab your attention if the mailer size is correct and the message is correct. We now have created this impact point for you, planted the seed that wouldn’t have existed if we just pack that thing in a coupon pack or something like that.

And so, now direct mail is probably more underutilized. And so when you can create that impact by getting the timing right, it’s a slam dunk.

Direct Mail Automation Tech Has Left Every Day Direct In The Dust

Justin Queen:

We hear also, business owners, they’re still doing that every door stuff.

Yeah, it’s super cheap per person, but if you calculate up what it actually costs you a customer, it can be astronomical in a lot of cases.

And so, we really see that as a lot of media sold as media and we really hate that because we don’t think any of it should be sold as media.

We kind of feel like a lot of owner-operators get bamboozled on everything, including digital.

But when you look at what Postalytics can do and you look at how you create those high-probability scenarios, there’s just no reason to stack postcards in your office and to hit everybody in the neighborhood anymore. It’s just the technology has surpassed that.

Dennis Kelly:

Yes, I completely agreed with you. That just crystallizes some of the key reasons why we started Postalytics.

We just really saw that opportunity to reduce friction and to enable folks to send out one piece of mail, very targeted, one at a time at the exact moment that will have the most impact and so it’s phenomenal.

You’ve really helped to take that core underlying value with Postalytics, you’ve surrounded it with the right data and all the other elements so that you can just plug it in with a particular industry and make it work. It’s phenomenal.

Super Tight List Targeting With No Minimum Sends

Justin Queen:

And you guys also have really great list buying capabilities and the ability, you need to hit a route or a zone.

You can narrow it all the way down to I want this to go to people that are an average of 50 years old that live in a $750,000 house. And that is the new way to do blanket direct mail.

So really, you’re part of the movement that has made one direct mail piece what 50 used to be.

Minimal COVID Impact On Sales Engine

Dennis Kelly:

Well, speaking of a head trash, I’m getting plenty of head trash sitting here in my house for the last seven weeks and not getting in the office because of this COVID crisis.

I’m curious, has the COVID crisis had much of an impact on you? What advice do you have for folks out there that are trying to do appropriate marketing during this crisis? Do you have any thoughts?

Justin Queen:

Yeah. Honestly, we’re very fortunate. During the last great recession (my previous business), we were impacted enormously. We lost 60% of our customers in three months because of the industry we were in and because of some of the times.

But with Sales Engine and with the industries we work in, we’ve seen very little financial impact from COVID and that’s largely because of the certainty that we provide our customers, so it’s been really neat to kind of watch because it’s like everybody had their freak-out moment.

And then we got in and looked at, okay, here’s what our lead trajectory is this month and here is what we’re spending our money on and here’s what we need to do to pull these levers to get our cost per customer.

If the pie got smaller, here’s what we need to do to get our cost per customer back down to where we can still be profitable as we kind of push through some of this market’s fear and turmoil and stuff like that.

And then after we got through that and made those adjustments, we saw people calm down and then they saw their lead trajectory stabilize and then in some cases, even go up and that’s when they were like, “Wow, this stuff really works. This is really cool.”

Now we know they weren’t panicking and freaking out and just slashing everything to the bone like everybody around them and being able to help them stay in that positive mindset was a key.

I was really proud of, honestly, our company. Everybody was kind of cut from the same cloth in that moment because we saw a lot of businesses from … I mean, there were a lot of people on the other side

of that fence.

And still, I got a text from somebody I know today where they are in complete different situation than 10 weeks ago and might lose their business.

They’re in an industry where they could have prevented that. They’re not a customer of ours, but we wish they were.

You’ve got to have leverage you can pull to make adjustments and you’ve got to understand operationally what you need to do to make adjustments.

What we do is we make sure the front end is exactly where we need to be set up for profitability and so that has been a big strategic advantage as we push through this.

Generating Leads With Cost Certainty Works In A Recession

Justin Queen:

What do people need to do moving forward? You’re going to have to know, just like in the last recession, exactly what amount of money, in your landscape locally, it takes to get a customer through the door.

You also have to look at your referrals because marketing influences referrals too.

“Referrals aren’t free despite what you think.“

You have to invest a lot of time and effort and goodwill to get them to refer your business in the first place and so you’ve got to constantly massage that so that flywheel of referrals is constantly expanding.

Because if you just quit doing everything, you’ll kind of stay at the same and then your competitors will start picking people off and that little referral flow will start getting smaller and smaller, so you’ve got to put an effort to keep it right where it is, but you’ve got to hedge against that too.

You’ve got to go out and get new customers to keep that referral engine expanding and you’ve got to be able to do that to where you know exactly what it costs:

• to get those customers in the door and
• to keep those referrals flowing as a byproduct of that and
• what number it takes to be profitable

Because what happens in a contraction like we are now the pie immediately gets smaller.

Conversion Rates May Take A Dip: Be Ready To Pull Other Levers In Your Funnel

In a recession, people get freaked out or they can’t buy. Maybe there’s too many people in your industry in the same market, so what happens is your conversion rates go down.

If it took a hundred dollars to get a customer in the door, in the same environment, two months ago, now it’s going to take $150.

$100 may be what you need to make it profitable, so you’ve got to know what lever you can pull to get down to $100.

And you got to know that faster and better than your competitor because what they’re going to do is just look at their P&L at the end of the month, completely freak out and start slashing everything.

Well, that’s now your opportunity to go after their referral wheel I was talking about. Pick people off of them and that’s how new market leaders are born during recessions!

So having that certainty and that data is key and so that’s really where you got to be right now.

The easy business has left. That horse has left the barn and so now you’ve got to know what you’re doing and you’ve got to have time to focus on your business to pull those levers.

And so, my big message to people would be make sure you can work on your business more than you work in your business and know what levers to pull, to be able to do the things I just talked about and you’ll have a 10x … I mean, I guess 10x is kind of a cliche these days, but you’ll have a multiple advantage over your competitors.

Justin Describes Postalytics’ Primary Value Proposition

Dennis Kelly:

That’s great stuff. Wow. To wrap up, with your background and your experiences in mind, do you have one takeaway that you would want to pass on to the audience?

As you’re thinking about deploying direct mail automation as a part of the stack what is the most important thing that you’ve learned through this process that you can share with the audience?

Justin Queen:

I’ll kind of promote you a little bit too because I would have said this anyway, but Postalytics has finally given you the opportunity to not have to pay for a bunch of postcards you don’t need, for not having to worry about paying the guy that sends out the postcards. All that’s handled for you.

So use the remainder of your mind-share and your savings to really think about what it takes to … I mean, you’ve got to think about what does it take to get your customer from that particular point in their buying cycle to call you.

What is the strong call to action? What is the offer?

The Offer Is Super Important In Getting Leads To Act

Justin Queen:

So, an offer is really, really important. A lot of people are like, “Well, I don’t like offers. Offers are like selling and selling is icky.”

You don’t have to be tacky about it, but I will tell you that being symmetrical and blending in is not going to help you.

You’ve got to really come at them with value and you’ve got to come at them with something that’s going to pull them off the fence and say, “You know what, I’m definitely going to at least call that company,” so the offer is important.

Thinking about it from their perspective, a lot of business owners think about what they want from the customer. It’s not about you.

It’s about the customer, so talk about them, really think about what they want and engineer that offer to focus on what they want because if you can do that, you’ll get a way better response rate.

Justin Queen:

And then, also really think about probability. Postalytics now gives you the ability where you don’t have to hit a whole town anymore to get customers.

So what can you use Postalytics to narrow your probability for? You think about, “Okay, who is my customer?

My customer is the guy or the lady of the house that is between 45 and 65, that in a $750,000 and up home, that lives in this zip code.”

Postalytics gives you the capability to look at all those things, but you’ve got to really understand your customer enough to know how to narrow that probability. So now, instead of hitting 20,000 people, you only have to hit 450 and you’re hitting those one or 50 people in their mailbox unexpectedly.

So now what does it take to make that person go, “Wow, who are these guys? Maybe I should call them,” and that’s the last leg.

Mailing 300 To Get The Same Response As Mailing 5,000

Justin Queen:

So if you can get the probability and offer right, you’ve nailed a lot and you don’t have to worry about any of that. Postalytics will handle it for you and they didn’t pay me anything to say that.

You either have to figure that out or you’ve got to find somebody that can figure that out and now you can make that 300 people work. Those would have been the 300 people you would have potentially gotten anyway with the same strategy, but you’d have hit 5,000 people to get to that 300.

Now, you can just hit the 300. So just get your probability right and your ROI will be fantastic and all your friends will wonder how you’ve made direct mail this brilliant thing and you can just kind of make them buy you lots of beers to tell them about it.

Dennis Kelly:

Exactly. Many a “Quarantini”.

Justin Queen:

That’s right.

Knowing Your Customer Leads To Better Response Rates

Dennis Kelly:

So you touched on a couple of things, and really focusing on knowing your customer.

If you know your customer, you ought to be able to figure out some good offers to test.

I get asked all the time, “What kind of response rate can I expect?” And I tell people I see response rates from 12% to 0% and I see response rates in the high teens, I see response rates at 0.1%.

The main thing that I see are that offers are the primary determinant of what type of response you’re going to get on your mail.

And so, know your customer, knowing the timing, getting that offer dialed in is what it’s all about.

Justin Queen:

And I was just thinking. For what it costs just to send out one piece through Postalytics, you’re saving so much money. If you narrow the probability, now you can take that other money you would’ve spent and really invested in the offer to add value to the customer.

So what do people that are in the high teens doing? They’re creating an amazing entry point for the customer.

They’re making it very easy for the customer to call them and they’re figuring out a way to upsell them to increase the probability later, so it’s like the total McDonald’s thing. If they can get you to buy the cheeseburger, you’ll take the fries and the drink with that.

They spend a lot of money to get you in the door. They may not make a lot of money off cheeseburgers, but they make a ton of money off fries and soft drinks, which you hear Russell Brunson kind of using that advantage, but that’s where you can put a lot of that savings. You add that value to the customer.

Competitors Don’t Know How Sales Engine Clients Do It

Justin Queen:

And now you’ve got competitors looking at your mail piece being like, “How would they ever be able to afford to do that?” Well, they can afford to do that because they’re not having to spend that money on a lot of waste.

Dennis Kelly:

That’s right. Well, that’s phenomenal. I could talk to you all day about this stuff, but we ought to wrap it up here.

I just want to thank you, Justin Queen from Sales Engine Agemcy. You’ve put together an amazing model.

We’re thrilled that you’re a Postalytics customer and we’re excited to grow our businesses together, so thanks so much for joining us here today.

We’re excited to work through the rest of this crisis and on the backside of this and keep growing.

Justin Queen:

Us too, Dennis. I really appreciate it. Thank you.