In marketing your freelance services, you may wonder (or at least I do!) whether it’s better to market to direct clients by e-mail, on paper, or both. I don’t have a succinct answer to that, but here are a few thoughts.
For a long time, I was a devotée of marketing on paper: writing out a full-page cover letter, attaching my resumé and a business card, sticking it all in an envelope and mailing it to the potential client. I also did a number of postcard marketing campaigns, and I do think there’s a place for paper marketing materials:
- They stand out: most people’s postal mail is 95% ads and bills. So, although your marketing packet is a type of ad, it’s also interesting, and personalized, and shows that you took more than 30 seconds to put something together for this potential candidate.
- They stick around: once someone deletes an e-mail, it’s gone. But I’ve gotten inquiries from clients (literally) years after I sent them a marketing pitch in the mail, because my business card was still kicking around their office.
- They let you say more than you would in an e-mail: no one is going to read an e-mail that’s the equivalent of a full-page cover letter. But I’ve had fairly good success with full-page cover letters sent in the mail. They let you describe your recent projects, something about the client that makes you feel there’s a good fit, etc.
The downside of paper marketing materials is that they’re time-consuming and potentially costly to create and send, and your prospect has to make a very deliberate effort (in the form of calling or e-mailing you) to respond. There’s no reply button on a paper letter, so the prospect has to be really interested in order to follow up.
Just because I wondered what I might be missing, I recently joined Ed Gandia’s Warm E-mail Prospecting course. It’s online and self-paced, and I really like it. It’s helped me see the advantages of e-mail marketing–not blast e-mails that you send to 1,000 potential prospects with one click, but short (125 words or less), targeted, personalized e-mails that you send when you see a meaningful connection between you and the potential client. The appeal:
- They’re short: it takes me under one minute to read 125 words. I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail (marketing pitches from other translators, requests for information about freelancing, requests to speak or write or present, etc.) and when I open an e-mail and it’s short, personalized and to the point, I actually feel interested in reading it (here’s something written just for me and it will take two seconds…maybe it’s interesting!). But when I open an unsolicited e-mail and it’s 500 words, or begins with “I’d like to start by telling you about myself,” I often leave the e-mail “for later,” which usually means much later, or if the e-mail isn’t personalized, I end up deleting it without reading it.
- They invite immediate action: if your prospect is interested, they can click Reply, and simply answer, “Sounds interesting; can you send me some more information?” or “We may need someone like you in the future; feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn,” and they’re done with it.
- They’re easy to create once you get the hang of it: and easy is good. Easy is what gets done. Instead of tailoring the cover letter, then printing it, then printing your resumé, then locating a business card and an envelope, then stressing about whether the paper should be white or off-white, and whether it’s OK to use your leftover Christmas stamps on business letters, and so on, you just fire the thing off and you’re done.
Readers, other thoughts on this?
I regularly try both methods with mixed results. There is nothing like one of my happy clients making a personal referral though!
Thanks Jeff! Yes, very true! Doing a great job so that clients rave about you to their friends and colleagues is always the best marketing!
I just joined Ed’s list, lots of good resources. I’ll add his podcast to my list as well. Thanks!
Not a lot to say about snail mail, as I have never tried marketing my service via printed letters.
I purchased Ed’s program a while ago and found it just unbelievable – I sent about 20 emails and got 6 answers, which sould be just slightly less than 30%.
A combination of the two may certainly be possible. If not for a first approach, it’d certainly make an unusual follow-up!
Hello,
This is my first post, so hi to everyone. This is a really interesting blog Corinne – thanks for sharing your ideas.
I haven’t done much marketing but I have pitched from bad translations following Chris Durban’s sound advice . What I do is revamp the translation (well, part of it!), then print it out along with a fairly short cover letter, and off they go by snail mail.
A few days later, I email the prospect and send them the electronic version of the translation – it serves as a reminder of the snail mail, and they can also cut and past my translation if they want to use it.
Obviously this is not a big marketing campaign, but it’s just to say that I try to play on both fronts.
Best wishes from France,
Mark
Hi, Mark. That sort of pitching won’t work in all cultures (not even ethnic cultures but circles, environments, neighbourhoods etc.). Especially if the execution is somewhat aggressive (which may be difficult to control if pitching in the client’s native language that is not also your own), it can be taken to mean some sort of emotional blackmail or otherwise something imprestigious or not fully consistent with professional ethics.
Besides, by basing your unique sales proposal on bad translations, you make it look like the general sales proposal of our profession is bad. Thus, you may succeed at presenting yourself as someone who rises above the ground level, but that ground level will be quite below the sea level as a result of your comparative advertising.
It may be better to just pitch about all the lovely stuff that’s mentally associated with your translations, without referring as much as half a word to your competition (and thus hopefully making competition not worse than you but simply irrelevant — defeated competitors still put a dent in your war effort before they go down). (This is the Blue Ocean/Apple strategy.)
Hi Lukegos,
In my particular case, I pitch only to French companies who presumibly had their English texts translated by their own sales staff; i.e. French people who are not translators and who translate into their non-native language.
It has worked to some extent and I’ve netted one client who’s worth around €8k per year. The twist in the story is that they never did use my original pitch translation!
If you use the “bad translation” approach, you certainly have to frame your pitch very carefully, but it can be effective and by no means unethical. It’s like pointing out spinach in your friend’s teeth: you want to do it in a discreet and helpful way without making the person feel criticized or mocked.
I think the key is not to rely on a single approach in terms of either medium or content.
In addition to what you said under the first #2, a paper letter could be more difficult to just shred and bin or avoid passing on the boss if read by an assistant. It’s not just physical durability. Physical mail just simply gets more serious treatment.
You probably still won’t get too much response if you send applications to recruiters (although there too paper may win you an advantage), but a business profile and business offer could perhaps reach someone with business authority more easily and/or go to the ‘services we many need from time to time’ pile as opposed to the ‘CVs of people we might one day consider hiring’ stack.
And for that latter, no matter all the ‘content is king’ babble, I really would use professional graphic design for your blurb — unlike a hired employee’s CV, where you don’t want to look like your CV and cover letter were written by someone hired just for that purpose. Anybody can use bullet points and borders, but advanced stuff projects permanence, seriousness and business culture — it makes it look like it’s not by a freakish accident that they are reading your blurb.
(You also get away with more blurbing, generally more marketing in your presentation, if you have graphical presentation to match. Not only because of ‘show, don’t tell’.)
Like you, Corinne, I started out on paper — because we did not have computers yet. I used Glenn’s Guides (remember him?): 400 labels and a handout with instructions. I sent out 380. I personalized each cover letter, so it took a long time. I only did it once. Some replies came ten years later, most came back over the next three years. Bottom line: half of them became clients or contacts at one time or another. Not bad for paper. Obviously, I kept my day job back then.
The switch to email was a no-brainer, but I mainly used it to supplement the networking I did at conferences, or in response to referrals. Thus, your advice about networking and referrals is still more powerful.
A good post this week. Keep up the good work!
Interesting to read comments here.
For me the question is less paper vs digital and more the whole issue of *personalizing* whatever message you are sending out.
That can take the form of a sparkling revamp of a poor or awkward text currently being used by your potential client, as Mark describes, or a specific reference to something the client has on its radar screen (this will often be a window-of-opportunity/timing issue, which is equally important — reminding a potential client of your availability and specialization in, say, automotive press kits prior to a major trade show that you know they will be attending).
In my experience, it works best if you pitch high — to senior management, for example. Why? Because if their attention is caught they will send your letter or rewrite or comments “down” to the appropriate department and it will carry more weight because it comes from said senior person. I have seen this happen time and again.
@Lukegos — I can’t say I agree with your take on not using bad translations.
It goes without saying that “execution” isn’t “aggressive” (although translators who live in caves on mountaintops and only emerge to criticize low prices and bad clients will probably have to go through a detox session or two before even contemplating such an approach :-)). This issue has come up on Corinne’s blog before, however, and I have seen quite a number of translators who aren’t too successful at scaling back the indignation/aggression/snarkiness/school-marmish scolding. Who slip into rant mode at the drop of a hat. That’s a pity.
And I’m willing to guarantee that potential clients look more closely at a pitch from a translator who has taken the time and invested the effort to analyze *their own work* (and improve it) than a more generic “I produce outstandingly good translations” pitch which is by definition more bland.
The sequence/angle I recommend goes something like:
1. I really like your products/services [+ something specific to show you actually know what the products/services are; this is one reason such an approach is not suitable for mass mailings]
2. Alas, what you’ve got now, text-wise, doesn’t really do those products/services justice. (You, client, may not realize this because the text is not in your language; that’s normal.)
3. Here’s how I would improve/translate your document (+ include a few paragraphs translated, along with source text + initial poor translation, to make it easy to compare).
4. I know you take your products/services seriously (that comes over loud and clear in their quality, etc.); now that this problem has been pointed out to you, I’m confident you’ll want to address it.
Something like that?
Hi Corinne,
interesting topic indeed – thank you for sharing your views.
I regularly run small targeted marketing campaigns (with both methods), and have seen positive results with both. I guess it all depends on a number of factors, some of which we cannot monitor (such as the proverbial “right time, right place”, or the individual response to marketing messages).
Looking at my experiences, I’d say paper works quite well both in “cold” and “warm” situations (even if in the long-run mostly), whilst e-mails are more effective when targeting people we have some kind of connection with (be it having met them at conferences/events, getting introduced, or else) – with significant changes depending on the individual recipient countries, so it probably also has to do with the relevant business culture.
Connections via LinkedIn might also be valuable, but I haven’t seen any significant advantages so far (unless in case of people I previously met somewhere).
Hi Corinne
thank you for this interesting blog post (another one :-)) – always good food for thought.
I think that it might really be worthwhile to spend some time and effort on personalized paper materials since it shows (as you said) that this person has really put some effort in it. Of course, this ist not suitable for mass mailings, but who wants those anyway? It’s better to send out 3 perfect letters to 3 well-researched companies than 300 unpersonal letters to “Dear Sir or Madam”.
E-mails do have their advantages but the problem with e-mails here in Germany is that you are not allowed to send unsolicited e-mails to people you don’t know or who haven’t given you permission to do so. Thus, this approach might work well in the US or in other countries, but not here.
I guess this is another point in favor of paper, even if it is not one by my own choice.