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In this issue:
Marketing Article: Save Money, Save Time: How to Control Your Mailings - Part 1 of 3
Marketing Article: Unleashing The Inner Innovator - Part 1 of 3

If you're like many direct mailers, you think you have absolutely no control over your mailings. Right? Ah, but it's not so. You have a great deal of control over them. The trick is to know when and how to do all the "little" things that can ensure you maximum return.

No matter how good your sales literature is in content, if it's not sent properly, if it's not sent when it should be sent and if it's not sent to the right people it's a bad mailing. It's destined to fail.

Let's assume for now you have a really good mailing list. That leaves the matters of packaging your mailing and timing it. Both depend upon to whom you're mailing. If your mailing is going to consumers in their homes you do it one way. If, on the other hand, it goes to business people in offices it is handled entirely different.

So first, evaluate your prospects. Who are they? What are their habits?

Let's take business people. They get a ton of mail on Monday. They also often have meetings on Mondays. (Those horrid bell-ringing events we all hate.) Friday is a day that many people take off or leave their offices at noon. They have their minds on the weekend. (Unless they're like some of us who are entrepreneurs. We do business any day, any hour.)

So to send those people mail that will get to them on those days is suicide. Yours! You'll increase your returns if you avoid those days when mailing to business people.

If, however, you're mailing to people in their homes, try to get it to them midweek or on the weekend. Also, holidays are good for consumers. But they're very bad for business people.

After your mailing is done the fun begins. Make a chart. I keep mine in a three-ring binder. On it put a place for the date, the day of the week, returns and responses. Under responses make a place for the per day responses, the total responses and the actual percentage of the total mailing it represents.

I also usually try out three different sales letters. So I keep track of where I send each letter, i.e. what zip code or town or state. Then I can begin to see which letter pulls best for me. I then begin to use only that letter.

Then you want to figure out your actual break even point. You know your advertising cost and you know what you can afford to get a lead. So you divide what you can afford to spend at break-even for a sale into your advertising cost. Then you will know how many sales you must get to break even.

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Susanna K. Hutcheson is a professional advertising and direct mail copywriter. She was the first copywriter to utilize the Internet as a place to market this type of service. Susanna has clients all over the world. She writes everything from Web site content to direct mail and radio spots. Visit her Web site at http://www.powerwriting.com . Her email address is powerwriter@powerwriting.com . Telephone: (316) 684-0457.

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One of the most effective ways of setting yourself apart professionally in these turbulent times is by unleashing your "inner innovator". Learning to do this will differentiate you by making you the person who knows how to add value to your organization. How can you increase your innovative capacity and that of your enterprise?

A first step is to bust open the myth that creativity is a gift that a few select people are born with. Actually, we all have the potential to be creative. Perhaps not to the same degree, but we all do have innate creative abilities. As children, we were all more creative than we are today. This premise has been tested out many times over the years. For example, 1,600 five-year-olds were given a creativity test used by NASA to select innovative engineers and scientists, and 98 percent of the children scored in the "highly creative" range. These same children were re-tested five years later and only 30 percent of the 10-year-olds were still rated "highly creative". By the age of 15, just 12 percent of them were ranked in this category, while a mere 2 percent of 200,000 adults over the age 25 who had taken the same tests were still on this level. Creativity is therefore not learned, but rather unlearned.

Unless you go through a second childhood or hire a bunch of 5-year-olds, what can you do to tap into that innovative potential? First it would be useful to consider what creativity really is. I contend that creativity is about collecting and connecting dots ... dots being ideas, disciplines, ways of looking at problems, and experiences. As Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." In fact, knowledge is, in my opinion, the enemy of innovation. I am always amused when someone, upon finding a lost item, says, "Can you believe it? It was in the last place I looked." Well of course, who finds something and then continues to look for it? The same thing is true when looking for a solution to a problem. Once your brain finds what it thinks is the best solution, it stops looking. Where do we look for these solutions? We tend to look into our memory banks of what has worked in the past. And for those of you out there who are experts, I'll bet you "find" an answer quite quickly. Unfortunately, your solution might not be new, innovative, or even good. What we need to do is train our brain to keep looking, even when we have found an answer.

The reason children are so creative is that they look at the world with fresh eyes. They are always collecting dots that they eventually string together. Everything is a new experience. And rarely do kids jump to quick solutions. However, once they start going to school and socializing with other children, they are forced to fit it. Peer pressure drives conformity. Education focuses on the regurgitation of facts rather than on gathering new experiences. At university, you choose a major and then become an expert in that area. As we get older we find things in life that we like, to the exclusion of all else. We read the same sections of the newspaper. We watch the same movies. Eat the same food. Socialize with the same people. Read the same magazines. And we tend to find ways of operating that work for us. We use those modes continually without trying anything new. Our communication style. Our view of the world. Our political thoughts. As we get older, instead of collecting dots, we begin a process of dot elimination. We ride down the same path over and over.

What can be done to reverse the effects of time? The key is to restart the process of collecting and connecting dots. Much has been written on the techniques for sparking creativity and innovation. In fact, there are over 2,500 books with the word "innovation" in the title. A large portion of these are focused on "event-based" techniques for generating new ideas. That is, approaches to be used during brainstorming sessions. These< approaches may be a "5-step process", "7 techniques" or "9 tools". Although these are useful, I want focus on approaches that change the way you see the world. Approaches that, with practice, help make innovation an every day activity. As Aristotle has written, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit".

In the next two articles, I will describe what I call "The Four Thinking Lenses". These are four ways of looking at the world: thinking like a Pack Rat, a Matchmaker, a Kid, and a Contrarian. These lenses will help you collect and connect dots. But more importantly, they will shape your view of the world, which will subconsciously change your actions and behavior. And that will ultimately lead to different (and hopefully better) results.

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Stephen Shapiro is the author of 24/7 Innovation and founder of The 24/7 Innovation Group. He has advised many of the world's leading organizations, from BMW WilliamsF1, ABB and UPS to Lucent and Xerox. For more information, go to: http://www.24-7Innovation.com.