Recently I listened to a interview with Mark Joyner and Gary Halbert about Gary's famous "Coat of Arms" sales letter and marketing campaign. It's been called the greatest direct marketing success stories of all time.

You can read the actual "Coat of Arms" sales letter here:

http://www.dotcomsecrets.com/content/coa.pdf

Gary made millions of dollars selling these $2 Coat of Arms through direct mail. The letter was mailed over 600,000,000 times and he eventually sold the company for $70 million to Ancestery.com.

This is how it worked…

First off he would create a Coat of Arms for one family name… (like the Brunson family) He would go through the phonebook and find all of the Brunson's in the country and he would mail this Coat of Arms personalized to the Brunson family.

Then people like my wife would see the letter and get so excited that they'd buy a copy for themselves and for everyone else in the Brunson family.

He would then move on to the next last name. During his testing he found out something very interesting… If there were more then 7,500 people with the same last name, than that those letters wouldn't convert.

The reason was that their name was just too common and either they didn't believe the letter or they just didn't care. For example, names like Smith or Johnson are too common and he wouldn't get any orders. You had to find names like Brunson that weren't as common and you'd hit the jackpot.

That story got me very excited, but I couldn't think how to apply it to my business until I got the above postcard in the mail.

Notice anything special…?

The company prints out a ton of Brunson University products and then mails every Brunson in the country. What then happens (and this is a true story) is my wife finds the postcard and buys hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise for every Brunson she knows.

How could you apply this to your business? You could do all sorts of things… think of things like a mug, t-shirts, mousepads or some other kind of personalized project, go through and personalize to a certain last name and test it out with your local phonebook.

Here was a very memorable quote in the interview by Gary Halbert:
"Properly exploited, one good idea that occurs to you while walking on the beach is worth more than 10 lifetimes of hard work."

I hope creative wheels are turning at this point…

Using postcards in your business is a very powerful strategy. If you would like to see the postcard autoresponder system that I am using to completely automate this process, visit:

http://www.postcardautoresponder.com

Please comment on how you could use or are using some of these offline techniques in your online business.

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http://www.dotcomsecrets.com/blog/2006/09/the_coat_of_arms_revisited.html