Online Direct Marketing

It all started when I had a mail order computer company with my brother.

It was a cut throat business – made worse by the fact that we were both clueless when it came to marketing.

Our ineptness knew no bounds. Marketing was our biggest overhead by a long stretch, but we never paid any attention to it.

But one day I found myself on a day’s seminar with marketing genius Drayton Bird (kindly paid for by one of the publishers who were fleecing us).

At the time, one of the products we were doing well on was a CD writer (it was a long, long time ago). We were the first in the UK to sell them – and the Sunday Times even did a piece on us.

But others were obviously jumping on the band wagon.

At the seminar, I asked Drayton about this problem. There were a handful of vendors, selling the same item, at the same price.

His answer?

Just make a better offer.

So instead of shipping the CD writer with one free box of CDs, we advertised three free boxes (don’t forget, in 1995 a box of blank CDs cost £70).

Sales didn’t double – but they weren’t far off.

I was hooked.

Could it be that easy? I decided I had to brush up on this direct marketing malarkey.

Next was adding cartoons to the ads.

Did it work? I have no idea – we were too busy losing money hand over fist to test anything.

And besides, it was too little, too late.

At 24 years old, I went bust, with my older brother, for £221,439.

Although we were clueless, we were still turning well over £3 million a year.

My brother retired to the safety of a well paid job. I started another business archiving advertising agencies computer files on to CD (don’t forget, CD writers still cost around £7k at this time).

By this time I’d read both of Drayton’s books over and over again. I was learning fast.

I knew how many letters I needed to send to get a job. I knew how much they’d spend with me. But best of all it was recurring. My niche service was superb. It was unusual if they didn’t call me back in a few months for more business.

I made a very comfortable living, but of course, time was ticking against me. The price of writers was dropping steadily. And as you always hear in Dragon’s Den- it wasn’t scalable.

Soon, the agencies bought their own writers.

But by this time the web had well and truly arrived, and I was happy churning out ‘brochure-ware’ sites, which I’d learnt to code from scratch.

(Nobody – and I mean nobody – seemed the slightest bit bothered about what their site did for them. Just as long as they had one, they were happy.)

And happily, my web design business was scalable. I was perfectly positioned to grow it. But still being naive and wet behind the ears, I happily plodded on, on my own.

On the upside, it meant when the dot com bubble burst I only had to lay myself off, rather than a team of 20. Swings and roundabouts I suppose.

Things however, were looking grim. Bailiffs were knocking on my door.

But totally out of the blue, a recruitment consultant called, and placed me in a big swanky, FTSE 500 company in London, just in the nick of time.

It was a different world and really opened my eyes. Nobody could understand how I could get myself in front of the prospects they dearly wanted to do business with, at director level.

All I was doing was writing them intelligent sales letters. Everything I did, was stolen entirely out of Drayton’s books.

Anyhow, despite my God like ability to open doors with sales letters, turns out I couldn’t close a barn door, let alone a sale.

They paid me £16,000 to leave without a fuss, God bless them.

Before I had time to spend any of it I was placed in another company (literally, within the week).

Although they didn’t ask me to leave, they did pay me 6 month’s worth of ‘guaranteed on target earnings’ before they went bust (I was there two months).

But again, I walked in to another job, without a consultant this time. I just sent a bunch of letters – not a CV – to companies I thought I could help.

I say thought, because the company that took me on soon confirmed what I was mulling over: I was totally unemployable. It wasn’t long before they made me redundant (no sales). I drove home dejected. But on the same evening, the CEO phoned up and told me they’d made a huge mistake and could I stay on?

I’m not making this up.

To this day, I have no idea why. The only thing of any value I bought to that company was opening doors.

Here’s an example of one. Would you believe I wrote to the CEO of HSBC and got a personal reply, that teed up a meeting with two of his execs?

Anyhow, every time I got a result with a letter, I’d scan it, and mail it in to Mr Bird.

The day after I was ‘made-redundant-then-taken-back-on’, Drayon’s PA called and said he’d like to meet me for lunch.

The rest as the say, is history.

I’ve been picking his brains ever since.

And I promise you it’s all true. Just goes to show Chuchill was right:

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” – Sir Winston Churchill

If you want to avoid the countless mistakes I’ve made, and get the best stuff I’ve distilled off Drayton over the years,  hit the donkey on the top right, right now…