Direct Mail Strategy: Direct Mail Road Signs
Use hot spots to direct your reader’s eye
September 2007 By Pat Friesen
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8. Direct mail designers use type fonts and sizes, background colors, borders, violators, copy placement, images, callouts, and other graphic tools to create hot spots.
9. Direct mail writers create compelling hot-spot copy using the words “you” or “free,” customer testimonials, major benefits, strong calls to action, action verbs at the start of sentences and headlines, and other direct response techniques.
10. Hot spots are a team effort; writers and designers need to work together to make them effective.
Hot Spots in Action
1. Add a person or group of people to the photo of your office building or store, and you’ll transform the photo into a more interesting hot spot. The eye naturally is drawn to photos that include people or human elements, such as hands, feet or eyes.
2. Double the impact of photos by adding captions. When your reader looks at a photo, he or she looks below the photo for a caption. Use captions to highlight major benefits, focus on points of competitive differentiation or provide a strong call to action.
3. Create hot spots that break up long copy by using headlines and subheads, photo captions, bullets, violators, testimonials, sidebar stories, charts, icons drawing attention to phone numbers and URLs, and callouts. Rarely is a letter, brochure, insert or order form read from top to bottom, start to finish. Readers look for copy that interests them in bite-size pieces.
4. Use hot spots on response devices to restate benefits, showcase your guarantee, restate the call to action and response options, provide methods of payment, and offer shipping options.
5. State and restate major benefits in hot spots so your benefit story won’t get overlooked.
6. Position your major benefit at the beginning of a sentence, paragraph or headline. Don’t bury it in the middle.
7. Do not color-coordinate every component in your mailing. Instead, use a bright-yellow free gift insert or fluorescent-orange burst to highlight a customer testimonial in your letter.
8. Use hot spots appropriately. They don’t necessarily have to be big or bold. For example, the salutation of a letter doesn’t need to be large, colorful or even personalized to draw the reader’s eye to it. It’s a natural hot spot. However, it does need to be appropriately accurate to establish a rapport between the individual receiving and the person signing the letter. Used appropriately, “Dear Friend,” “Dear Preferred Customer” and “Dear Pat” all can be equally effective. In my case, “Dear Sir” (my name is Patricia, not Patrick) is not appropriate or effective.
9. Use hot spots strategically to gently move the reader’s eye from one place to another. Don’t fill your outer envelope with bright bursts of copy and expect it to get read. Too much of a good thing is not a good idea.
Words of Caution
As much as hot spots encourage scanners to become readers, there also are techniques that stifle readership. In most cases, you want to avoid:
1. dense copy blocks filled with long sentences;
2. large amounts of copy in difficult-to-read red or reversed-out type;
3. long headlines in all caps;
4. gray-screened backgrounds for copy;
5. body copy in smaller than 10-point type and/or in san serif type; and
6. justified copy that creates odd word spacing.
Pat Friesen is president of Pat Friesen & Co. She can be reached at (913) 341-1211, via e-mail at Pat@PatFriesen.com, or by visiting www.PatFriesen.com.
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