What message moves your target audience?
Direct mail, like no other medium, is able to move target audiences. But with which message does that work best? Any organization or brand will communicate a range of good reasons. Reasons that all convince the target audience to take action now.
Yet that is not the best way
Target audiences, meaning real people, expect nothing but a mountain of reasons to “do something. Something to buy, try, request, donate, and so on. But most people don’t feel like “doing anything” at all. After all, it takes effort, time and often money. And if people already want to take action in response to your inciting message, only a minority of them lead to actual behavior.
Intention is not yet behavior
In other words, there is a huge gap between “intention” and “behavior. But what to do now? For starters, what you want from your target audience is something different from what they were doing up to that point. In other words, you are asking them to change their existing behavior. Now we come to the point. Because opposite to motivating forces to “do something” (think “ups”) are inhibiting forces that make people not move.
The theory reads, “don’t bet on motivating forces, instead remove the main inhibiting force!”
How to do that?
- Name all conceivable inhibiting forces
- Find agreement on key inhibiting force
- Devise an intervention that neutralizes this inhibiting force
- Then translate this intervention into a catchy message.
At PSI, we call this process “flipping
Flip your challenge! By flipping the issue, so to speak. And you can learn to do that. For starters, get inspired by PSI. In a one-hour Flip! session, you’ll hear and see what you need to know about this. And do you want to apply this to the desired behavior of your target audience? Then have us conduct a Flip! workshop at your location. We have already done this for many of our clients. In no time you will have a kick-starter in your hands, which will make your direct mail expression successful in one go.
Want to know more? Contact Olaf Cox at 0642577006 or olaf@psi-vransen.nl.