Christian Little

Package enclosures are a great way to increase sales and get return customers, so today I’m covering what they are and how to get started with them. Note – this marketing technique will work for anybody that ships products, regardless of whether you sell other products or not (explain below).

Imagine this, a customer buys a set of linens from your web store. You ship the package out to them, and they receive it the following week as expected. When they open the package, there’s a nifty little flyer laying on top of the product they purchased, showing them deals on related products (i.e. “You can save 15% on duvet covers!”, etc).

Assuming you sent them a good quality product and don’t send a ton of spam with it, customers will generally react positively to these types of enclosures.

Getting Started

Now before you jump the gun and start sending a pile of useless crap to your customers, there’s a few general pointers you need to be aware of when doing this types of enclosures:

• Only send them information on related products. So if a customer bought pillow cases, for example, don’t send them information on window cleaner.
• Whenever possible, include a special offer that is exclusive to them. A great way of doing this is to insert a coupon for 10% off their next order on your website, or 15% off a specific product if they order in the next 30 days.
• Don’t send them pages and pages of product offerings. The most effective enclosure is no more than 3-5 pages, and even that is probably stretching it. Customers have very short attention spans and if you send them a ton of crap you’ll overload them and they’ll react negatively.
• If you have a huge number of products in various categories, then you can include a “Fill out this card and send it back to us for a free product catalog” type enclosure. If a customer fills that out, then you can send them a bunch of information on hundreds of products because they actually want to see it (but 90% of your customers won’t so don’t send it to them in the first place).

But What If I Only Sell 1 Product?

There’s a simple solution to this – promote affiliate products. Login to a network like Shareasale or Commission Junction and join a few programs that are closely related to yours. Then review them to see which offer coupons and other special deals. You can make your own customized ad based on the deals, and tell your customers to go to http://www.yoursite.com/redirect where “redirect” is just a simple redirect script to the merchant site (thus accrediting the sale to you).

If you are in this situation, try to use big brands. So with the pillow case example above, maybe get coupons for “Linens & Things”, “Home Outfitters”, and any other massive merchants. Customers tend to react better if you send them things from merchants they are familiar with, even if you get a lower commission from them you’ve got a higher conversion rate so it tends to balance out.

But This is Really Expensive

Not really. If you are doing a low volume of customers, you can just print the coupons and deals you send out as needed from your own computer. If you are doing a high volume of sales (i.e. 10 or more per day), then just wander in to your nearest print shop and get them to run a batch of 500-1000 that will sustain you for 2 months and only cost you about $100.

If you need a good printing company, I highly recommend MinuteMan Press, I have used them in the past for dozens of projects and they have been amazing. They have branches in every major city in North America, and all of the people working at each branch I’ve worked with have been extremely friendly and try to accommodate you as best they can.

I pretty much refuse to use any other printing company now because of how good their service has been.