Local Market Monopoly

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Evan Uyetake: Getting your demographics, correct. Is really important. And then really simplifying your message is really important too. When you have a direct mail piece, you do not have a lot of time to capture that person's attention. So you want to be very clear with the things that you're communicating to them. So tying all that together, there is definitely some strengths with direct mail and direct mail has a lot of cool tools at his disposal. I think when you're saying that there's a lot of people that don't know necessarily maximize or get the most out of direct mail it's because they're not fully maximizing some of the, the resources and tools that are available through direct mail. And that's where partnering with an organization that understands some of those things makes it that much more important.

Clarence Fisher: Hey, welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. I am Clarence Fisher and today we're going to dive into direct mail with my good friend, Evan Uyetake . Evan is president of Trost marketing, a Tulsa based agency that does business all over the country, probably all over the world, Evan himself. He's the perfect example of working your way to the top. He graduated from university of Tulsa and with his experience in sales and put, you know, a little street smarts with it, he grew from being that cold calling salesperson to the CEO of the company in less than eight years, he creates a marketing campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the country, dish network, direct TV, vivid, smart home century link, and tons of others. He's got 15 years of experience and not only marketing and not only direct mail, but also marketing.

Clarence Fisher: And you will hear that in this interview, he's developed a turnkey marketing program that they use for businesses all over the country. And he took Trost marketing from just a direct mail agency to now they are, they're a full service, you know, kind of printing solution. They have online marketing, they do, uh, promotional products and he focuses a lot on company culture. We spoke a little bit about that, but he is big on company culture and was named one of the best places to work. I think in like 2016, he's also a published writer and has articles featured all over the place and local and trade publications. So one day we were having lunch. I believe it was the petroleum club here in town with a bunch of other successful CEOs and, uh, you know, kind of in the break, I was like, eh, Hey man, would you mind coming on my podcast? And he was like, sure, it didn't even blink an eye. So we have him today and I'm so grateful. You will be too. Hold on. We'll be right back with Evan.

: You're listening to local market monopoly with Clarence Fisher, uncovering the tools tactics and strategies. The most successful small businesses use in their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Evan, Evan, Evan. I'm so honored to have you on the show, man. How are you doing? Thanks. Thanks for being on the show.

Evan Uyetake: Hey man, thanks for having me on. I love doing these things

Clarence Fisher: Awesome, man. I've been looking so forward to this. Now I know how awesome you are and how awesome Trost is, but tell everyone else who may not know about Trost marketing and what you do to help your clients.

Evan Uyetake: Well, shoot, that might be the episode right there. Trost marketing is a company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We kind of got our start on the direct mail side of things, helping businesses, target potential customers, potential clients for products that they have. And it's really kind of grown into a turnkey marketing department for small to large corporations, small businesses, I should say small businesses to large corporations. We do things as basic as getting people set up with business cards, promotional items, flyers, brochures, those kinds of things, all the way to turnkey, direct mail programs for authorized dealers and franchise networks users using our facility here, it's about 364,000 square foot by the airport. And we also incorporate what we call company stores. And so a company store would be you're a brand and you want to have your brand identity protected. You want to make sure your colors are correct.

Evan Uyetake: You want to make sure things are done professionally and maybe you have a nationwide network of franchisees, whatever else we'll create a singular place for all that, which includes direct mail, but we'll go all the way through many of the marketing tactics that the customers need. So been with Trost for 15 years now. And so it's been a, it's been a fun journey working with entrepreneurs, working with the local community, working with nonprofits. We're just working all across the spectrum to kind of understand what they're trying to accomplish, come alongside them and then give them the tools to grow. So that is Trost marketing in a nutshell, wow. 15 years, 15 years in a row. Yeah.

Clarence Fisher: That's awesome. And not a single sabbatical,

Evan Uyetake: No sabbaticals yet.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. Jumping right into it around here. We talk a lot about dominating a local market, especially with your marketing. And in order to do that, typically we will start with something like Facebook ads or Google ads, Google ad words. You may end up on YouTube, of course, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever your ideal customer is. But once we maximize all of the digital properties, we have to start jumping offline in order to get that presence, you know, that omnipresence that we really want. And so that brings in radio TV, billboards, and definitely direct mail. And I know for sure direct mail is super effective, but a lot of local business owners don't get the most out of direct mail or they don't even know if they should be adding it. What do you feel like are some of the advantages of using direct mail and direct response marketing for local businesses?

Evan Uyetake: Well, I think for a local business, it communicates that you're local. A lot of times through your address and being a tangible piece that maybe they've, you're tying some of your local branding to that direct mail piece. There's going to be some recognition because they're hopefully seeing some of the other marketing tactics that you have out there. But when it comes to being successful in direct mail and really maximizing some of the potential, there's a lot of things that give direct mail, a strategic advantage over a lot of other marketing tactics. One of those being as a tangible piece, when you're looking at like TV radio, when you're even looking at some social media marketing, those are impressions. Those are people seeing your logo. That's, it's almost like a branding type of thing, but you can't take a billboard, fold it down and put it in your pocket.

Evan Uyetake: You can't record for, for what I know a radio commercial and put it in your pocket and save it for later. You almost have to be very consistent with something like that, to where, when they are ready to buy. First of all, they know about you. And second of all, then they're going to be looking for you when that, when that time happens with direct mail, you have the advantage of specifically going to the target market that you want and then getting directly into their hands. So every single day with the exception of Sunday, somebody walks out to their mailbox. They open that door and they pull out the mail and they do what I call a mail sort. They're separating the mail from their aid pile and there'd be pile. So we have a decision maker at that point. A pile is the things that they're going to hang on to some things that they're going to keep, but they want to learn more about the B pile is the instant trash pile, the trunk of the male part.

Evan Uyetake: And so they're going to go through that decision making process. And then ultimately we want to be direct response. So we're going to put some sort of call to action. We can put a sense of urgency on the cards to really encourage people to respond right away. We're sending this mail piece. There's only a shelf life per se, a perceived shelf life with it. But direct mail becomes very personal at that point because now I'm having an intimate conversation, one-on-one with my decision maker. And so that's one of the reasons that a lot of people are attracted to direct mail, but if you're not maximizing some of the strengths of direct mail, like the targeting side of it, and really understanding who your customer is, you could do direct mail and you could have that kind of conversation with them. But ultimately what happens is in that conversation, you're talking to the wrong person.

Evan Uyetake: So getting your demographics correct is really important. And then really simplifying your message is really important too. When you have a direct mail piece, you do not have a lot of time to capture that person's attention. So you want to be very clear with the things that you're communicating to them. So tying all that together, there is definitely some strengths through direct mail and direct mail has a lot of cool tools at his disposal. I think when you're saying that there's a lot of people that don't know necessarily maximize or get the most out of direct mail, it's because they're not fully maximizing some of the, the resources and tools that are available through direct mail. And that's where partnering with an organization that understands some of those things makes it that much more important.

Clarence Fisher: Excellent. Okay. So let's say I've decided that we're going to move forward with direct mail with a campaign and you spoke about targeting and messaging. That's great. What are some other element elements that you feel like we can put into place to make sure that we get the best conversion possible? Because some people may say, Hey, we tried it, it didn't work well, what can we do to get, what can we offer them to get better results?

Evan Uyetake: I think part of it is again, and I'm going to say this a lot. I have a feeling is knowing your customer. If you know what the hot buttons are for your customer, you're going to want to talk about that pretty quick, creating a sense of urgency, limited time offer. You'll see something like, so TV is a great example of some of the people who have kind of figured it out like the infomercials, right? So infomercials, have you noticed that they have a countdown timer on infomercials? A lot of times, you know, why they do that? They want you to call right now, like, Hey, I only got 10 minutes to call. So what they're doing is you do online marketing too. Like sometimes like you're filling out that form. They're putting that timer on there. Not necessarily to get you to do something quickly.

Evan Uyetake: I think a lot of that has to do with, they want you to finish it, but they don't want you to get halfway through it and stop. And then potentially that sale. They're going to put that timer on there. It's an arbitrary timer. The purpose of that timer is to create that sense of urgency so that you completed all the way through. And for me, like I'm on buying concert tickets or whatever else I'm going to go all the way through it. And I'm not going to flake on those concert tickets because I'm like, man only got five minutes to fill this thing out. And then they're going to capture that. So essentially urgency is big and you can use, you can do things like a gift with purchase with that. You can do things like, you know, the first a hundred customers will get a free installation, different things along those lines, coupons like people will use direct mail for coupons and they'll put expiration dates on coupons.

Evan Uyetake: Most places that I've been to will honor an expired coupon, but for the general population, you put an expiration on that coupon, the company that's doing, not the restaurant, that's doing that. Whatever it may be wants you to come in during a certain time period so that they can track and see how well that that mail piece has responded. So those are some of the things that we're going to do in that. A pile is like, Oh, a coupon. Well, I want to hang on to coupons cause I want to save money. So that's a great idea. Sense of urgency, what you know, call between limited time offer. So we we're outlying that. That's, that's something that we want to use too. And again, hitting, hitting on those hot buttons, I think is really key. There's certain reasons that people respond. Now, if we're going to get broad, sometimes it's just when they have money.

Evan Uyetake: So we call those buying weeks. The weeks that they get paid, they're more than likely to spend money or respond to things. When they actually have disposable income in their bank account, they don't have money in their bank account. Let's say they're going paycheck to paycheck. Maybe we want to try to alternate those weeks where we're putting pieces in market, because depending on what your product is, you may not necessarily want to be in homes those days, you're going more branding than you than you are direct response. It just kinda depends on the kind of product that you have and the kind of person that you're trying to target. But let's say for example, it's really hot right now. And people are just getting their electric bills or whatever bill. They have this tied to their, their air conditioning in their house. That's a hot button because now they're having to pay more for that.

Evan Uyetake: So if I'm an insulation company, if I'm a roofing company, roofing companies probably would be ones that like after big storms. So like a hailstorm happens or something like that, we're going to want to go quickly into there and just say, Hey, you know, this big storm happened. We need you to respond quickly because we're going to be in your neighborhood. Whatever that, that message is, we want to hit on those hot buttons. We want to be timely. We want to be relevant and that's, what's going to ultimately get people into that tape pile. But another prime example, we live here in Tulsa. I even posted this on my Facebook page. I would have loved to been in the storm shelter business a couple months ago. When those tornadoes kept touching down, because guess what? If I'm sending out mail for storm shelters, I'm going to, my phone is going to be lighting up. And those are some of those things that we want to take in consideration when we're doing those campaigns.

Clarence Fisher: Great idea, man, that's fast. What's the normal turnaround time for these types of campaigns.

Evan Uyetake: So for like a roofing company, that would be something where we'd have something in stock. So they already know, Hey, this is the time of year where this is our budget. This is when we're going to allocate pieces. We don't necessarily know when they're going to drop, but as soon as it's ready, we want to process it in mail basically. Hey, I'm going to call you and give you these zip codes, whatever areas that they believe that the storms have hit. And then we'll process that within a couple of days. I mean, that's, that's a quick turnaround time. Some of the other stuff, I mean, you just know summer's going to be hot. So you have all summer. One of my customers that is a long lawn care service, not necessarily mowing, but like treating the yards for weeds and those kinds of things. There's a certain time of year that they know that people are starting to think about that the lawns are starting to right before the lawns are gonna start to green up. So they just know that that's going to happen. So sometimes you do need to plan ahead. I'd say, if you're going to be reactive with your mail, you're not going to be as effective. You need to be more proactive. And again, that comes down to knowing your customer, knowing their hot buttons and knowing essentially when those times are, because that's really where your money is going to be made.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes total sense. So what are some of the biggest myths out there that you run into when it comes to utilizing direct mail or direct response marketing to grow a business?

Evan Uyetake: So I run into all sorts of things. One of the biggest things that I run into is like, Oh, we tried that 10 years ago and it didn't work. That's one that I always kind of cringed at a little bit because it male's changed a lot in 10 males changed a lot, three years in two years. And part of male is that it's not necessarily about sending it all out at once or just doing a big blast. It's more about the consistency part of it. And so a lot of times people will do a campaign and maybe they just, they did it. They like, they check the box, right? Like, Hey, I need to do a mail campaign. We have an intern that knows how to do graphic design. Okay, great. We're going to have him create our piece and then we're going to just upload it to an online printer and process it and mail it.

Evan Uyetake: Well, you checked the box, you technically mailed, you didn't take advantage of necessarily all the things. And so sometimes I think people will just say, okay, well I tried direct mail. It didn't necessarily work, but I don't know that they maximized all of the, all of the tools that direct mail has. And so I'd say, keep an open mind about that. The other one I would say is that that email has replaced mail. I think sometimes people look at it doesn't necessarily cost anything to send emails or it's very low in terms of price. And then we can send a bunch of them out consistently and therefore we no longer need to do direct mail. That one is a pretty big myth and, or even kind of, kind of getting into generations, millennials, gen X, they don't respond as much to direct. Now the numbers say differently.

Evan Uyetake: According to the direct marketing association, a lot of people, especially millennials are very price conscientious. And so they are a little bit more old school where they're not necessarily always going to be responding to email types of things, but email is essentially the new junk mail. It's, uh, it's, it's cluttered. There's a lot of people in there trying to get visibility, even if they're trying to get someone to open one of those things, that's pretty difficult. The beauty of that is that now the mailbox, the physical mailbox is less cluttered and it's a more personal message. Now, if I'm going to spend the money and take the time to specifically target a customer that I want to be in front of, that's going to go to that mailbox every single day. That's a more personal intimate conversation. And so they're not having to sort through as many pieces certain times of the year, they may political seasons coming up.

Evan Uyetake: So you're going to see a little bit more in the mailbox then, but for the most part, you're going to have less competition in the mailbox. You're going to have higher visibility, higher readership race with a decision maker. And so kind of overcoming that objection of email is kind of replacing direct mail is one that we come across a little bit, but it's not necessarily one that's difficult for us to overcome it. And I think it just really kind of comes down to having a conversation and kind of being able to outline some of the strengths of mail. And I'm a lot of times people just kind of nod their head and go, yeah, that makes sense. And it does. The last one that I would say is something that the post office did. They actually kind of created this challenge a little bit and it's a program called every door, direct mail.

Speaker 1: Have you heard of it? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So every door direct mail is a program that they launched the basically a saturation mail. And it's this easy quote unquote easy program that you can do where you don't have to have a postal permit. You don't even have to have a list. You need to know where you want to go. You print it, you deliver it to the post office and his mail for you. So in a perfect world, yes, it can be that. The challenge that we run into with every door direct mail is they only advertise the price of postage. So when we were talking to somebody and they're saying, well, I can do. And every door direct mail campaign for 13 cents, you're like, you can plus the cost of design plus printing plus delivering it to all the local post offices. And then I kind of get that deer in headlights, look of what are you talking about?

Evan Uyetake: And like tell you what do that first campaign, and then come back and we'll talk. And ultimately what happens is, is they realize that there's some hidden costs there that the post office isn't necessarily telling you about. Now, if you have, let's say a person that's 50% optimized that your office, every door direct mail might be a good program for you in the sense that you have an idle person that you can actually put on that to kind of go through some of those additional steps. You're paying them anyway. Yes, there could be some savings there, smaller campaigns carrier, route saturation. That that part's good, but when it really comes down to it, we've kind of done the cost analysis based on some of the programs that we offer. And we're actually very comparable by the time you add everything back in, in terms of doing a saturation campaign, that's targeted that we're going to help you identify the carriers that you want to go to based on more than just income or more, more than just the number of households to get you a little bit more targeted, a little bit more strategic in what you're doing.

Evan Uyetake: And your time has value. Time is something that you essentially allocate every single day to whatever's going on in your business. And a lot of times you're not calculating the time that you're spending on putting together an EDDM campaign, as opposed to doing payroll, working with your sales team, doing installs, doing sales, running your business, whatever else. And if you can allocate that time, great, if you don't have a lot of time, every door direct mail campaigns may not be the best fit for you. So just kind of understanding what the strengths of it are. And then when you come along a mail service provider like us, where we can kind of do everything for you, turn key. There's a lot of value that happens there. We try to go heavy on the value so it's not even a question, but we will run into people who are just like, well, I can do EDDM and that's what I'm doing. And that's fine. It's just, it's not quite what the post office presents it to me all the time.

Clarence Fisher: Right. Read the fine print. One of the things that I've always heard when you do direct mail, and you let me know if this is right or not, but if you're going to mail something that you should break it up into three different mailing. So like if you have one big, you know, I can only afford to mail 1000 letters or postcards. It's best for me to break that into three separate mailings, consecutive mailings, rather than mail the one, 1000 list all at once. Is that a better way to do it?

Evan Uyetake: Well, when you're talking about a consistency and that kind of goes back into the buying weeks that we talked about, I'd much rather have it spread over a larger period of time to where I'm going to have better opportunity for success, as opposed to, like I said earlier, checking that box. Yes we technically mailed a thousand pieces, but we mailed, you know, 250 pieces, four times as opposed to a thousand pieces. One time consistency is a big part of mail. And that's where you're going to see the better response rates. That's where you're gonna put yourself in the best opportunity for success. The other thing that I'd really have a couple of conversations about would be, first of all, what kind of list are we going after? Is this a customer list where people are continuing buying from you? So like, it's, let's say it's a restaurant and a restaurant has like a core group of people that are coming in multiple times a week.

Evan Uyetake: That's a fantastic list. You should absolutely mail to that list. If you're prospecting, let's say you sell, let's say you sell air conditioners, stuck on air conditioners right now. Let's say you sell air conditioners. Well, they're going to buy an air conditioner from you one time, and then they're probably not going to buy from you for hopefully 10 to 15, 20 years. I don't know how long an air conditioner lasts, but they're going to, that's going to be like a singular thing. So you're not going to reengage your customers with direct mail because that customer already bought from you. Then they're probably not going to buy from you again. So then it kind of comes down to how well do you know what your potential customer looks like? Is it a certain age? Is it a certain income or the Nate is the year that the homes were built.

Evan Uyetake: Does that play in, do you want to do new construction or do you want to do how's this probably 30 years old is probably do part of it is taking a look at the customers that you have and kind of backing into all right. What do these customers look like? Why don't you do a lot of social media marketing, right? Yeah. So you're looking at a look alike audience at that point. You're basically saying these are the kinds of customers that I have. What does that customer look like? So I can target more strategically of those kinds of people. So knowing that going into a direct mail campaign is really important because through the demographics that we have available to us, we can get pretty targeted on the kind of people that we want to put the mail piece into the hands of.

Evan Uyetake: So that conversation, consistency will be part of that conversation, knowing your audience. And then again, your message. What are we offering? Are we just going to put out a piece that has your logo on it and talk about all these great services that we provide, or is there a specific reason that we want them to respond? Cause ultimately me as a mailer, I'm going to be held accountable indirectly for how well that campaign does, right. You're going to say, well, I use Trost to do this mail campaign. I don't think it worked that great. Well, if you don't think it worked that great, you're probably not gonna use me again. If you don't use me again. And I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to get you to try direct mail one time, potentially souring your opinion of it, and then never getting business again. In my industry, if I help you with mail, my goal is to have you do mail consistently because more mail that you're doing with me, that means you're growing as a business and I I'm able to grow alongside of you.

Evan Uyetake: And that's really kind of the relationship that I want to have. That's why I'm not an online printer alone, only printer doesn't care. They just print it and process it and go onto the next thing. So for us, we're going to be a little bit more strategic in that sense of making sure that we're, we're directing and guiding you towards a desired results. So the desire result for us in direct mail for the most part is either bringing that coupon in or a phone call. And if we can get that phone call, we can get those coupons and you can track it. You can see how well that campaign did. Now. You can start backing into your cost per call, your cost per sale, your lifetime value of a customer. You can start looking at all these different things and say, this direct mail campaign did really well for us because we generated X amount of dollars in sales, or it only costs to get a conversation where I'm able to make a presentation with a potential customer who meets the criteria of the kind of customer that I want to be in front of.

Evan Uyetake: That costs me. Let's say it costs you at $28. You get back into the number is $28. Would you spend $28 to sell a $1,200 less, probably more than that. A $10,000 air conditioning system? Absolutely. Because even if my close rate is 25%, that's what a sub $200 cost sub 150 cost per sale. I mean, that's, that's phenomenal. So it's just really trying to kind of back into and understand like, what are we trying to get accomplished here if we're just doing branding? That's great. I mean, I'll send out a ton of branding mail for you, but you're probably going to do that a couple times, unless you have a really big budget and most small businesses don't have a big budget, so they're going to want to be very strategic with it. And they're going to want to make sure that we're tracking towards a desired result, which for them is ultimately going to be a phone call and then leading to a sale.

Clarence Fisher: Right? What are some of the most common fears that you feel small businesses have about using direct mail?

Evan Uyetake: I hear it every once in a while. I don't think it got delivered when you have things like brochures or yard signs or whatever else. And I print it and then I ship it to you. It shows up at your business. You're like, yeah, Trost made that for me. That it's right here. I know that it happened when you do mail and the phone calls don't come in immediately that I think that thought bounces around in people's heads. It's like, Oh, this is an awesome money laundering business. All you do is you say you're going to fail something and then you never mail it. And then I just give you money and then know, hopefully nobody notices it. That is not the reality, but that's what people tend to think sometimes. So there's a couple of things that we've put in place to help overcome those fears.

Evan Uyetake: One of them is, is real simple. You just put your address in that batch of mail. So we call that a seed mailer and you can put multiple seed Millers in there, say, Hey, I want to make sure that these pieces go out. So essentially what happens is we sort that in with everything else, when we mail the piece, you get a mailer essentially the same time as your customer gets the mail, which tells you this is when my mail is hitting homes. And it gives you an approximate time. So you can adjust accordingly and make sure that you're capturing every potential lead that comes from that campaign. There's other things we can do from a tracking standpoint, uh, tracking phone numbers is one. So you or you on your end, you can create a unique phone number, getting phone numbers these days.

Evan Uyetake: It doesn't cost very much money, but if that number is only advertised on your direct mail piece and phone calls come in that direct mail phone number, do you have a pretty good understanding of how many calls that campaign generated that that number is not online? That number is not in your yellow pages. It's not in your billboard. It's not on your yard signs. It's not on any of your other marketing tactics. So if you have those unique numbers, then you can get a very good understanding of how well that campaign performed. And I'll say this direct mail, obviously we want a direct response. We want people to respond as soon as they get it, it doesn't always happen because it's tangible, they'll put it on the refrigerator or they'll stick it in their little bundle of promotions. And when they're ready to buy, they're going to go grab it and they'll call it.

Evan Uyetake: That could be three months later. And if you really kind of geek out on those numbers, it's going to help you. It's going to kind of help see what design was performing well. What message was performing well, I'm still getting calls on this campaign that I mailed four months ago. That kind of stuff can be important because when you're creating your next campaign, you can use that information that you've gathered from that. We use something that's called intelligent barcodes on the mail campaigns that we do. It's, it's tracking that the post office has, that will tell us as the mail's going throughout the system. So we can actually see the scans that happen as it goes to the different facilities. So there's a lot of tools that we put in place to overcome that objection or that fear of, you know, I don't, I'm not quite sure that it went out, but that's one that we run across. And if your mail service provider has done a really good job, or the agency that you're doing, has done a good job of putting some of these things in place to track that campaign. You're not going to have that fear. And that's, that's our job as businesses is to overcome those fears so that whenever you're deciding what you want to do, you have all the tools available to you and you recognize that campaign is going to go out exactly as you want it to. Right.

Clarence Fisher: Excellent. So how can they get past these fears? I mean, like what other obstacles do you see that might be preventing a local small business from, let's say seeking the help of a direct mail agency.

Evan Uyetake: I'd have to ask each one individually. I don't know that there's a universal thing. I think sometimes they've just have always done things a certain way. And so they feel like if this is what we've done, this is what we'll continue to do. And this is where our leads are coming from. So sometimes people just get stuck because they just want it. They don't want to upset stuff. They just want it to kind of be what it is sometimes. Like I said, they've, they've done it in the past. Maybe they didn't do it after hearing some of the things that we're talking about today, they're sitting there going, okay, well maybe, maybe I need to take a look at this again and be a little bit more strategic with that mail because that's ultimately male strength is the strategic part of it, but it can be a little intimidating and I'll go back to EDDM. If you've done EDDM, every door direct mail, you might've gone to man, that's a hassle that's. I thought it was going to be easy. It was not as easy as I thought it was going to be. I had to go to every single post office carrier out that I wanted to go to. I had to go through a web application to select my routes and print these labels and bundle it all together, man, that was just an absolute hassle. They might not want to touch it again. And I get that. I wouldn't want to either, but I think part of it is, and hopefully they're listening to this recognizing that there are companies out there, like Trost that have the opportunity and the ability to make that a turnkey process for you. So what we've done is what we've found in the marketplace is that people like to do business with people.

Evan Uyetake: So we have marketing specialists that will walk you through the campaign. I answered the questions that you have help you with the demographics in terms of finding the list. If you have your own list, help you clean up that list. Cause sometimes your list is going to have duplication. Sometimes the person that was typing that information in your database, they fat-fingered something and Tulsa spelled 10 different ways will help clean that up. And then ultimately we can make it kind of a turnkey thing so that when you have gotten that first campaign underneath your belt, a lot of that groundwork has now been laid. So that later on, you can say, all right, we want to do it again. And we can even help with the graphic design stuff too. Like sometimes people say, well, I don't have a graphic designer. So I don't have the ability to build this campaign because I can't design a piece or I don't even know what to say in the piece.

Evan Uyetake: So again, that's kind of where a company will come into play and just say, Hey, I need to do a direct mail campaign or want to do direct mail campaign, but I don't have the resources. That's not that for us. That's not a problem. I mean, we've kind of built ourselves around that plug and play marketing department for you where you can come in and say, Hey, I want to do a direct mail campaign. Here's who I'm trying to target. And then we'll present to you basically what it's going to cost. We'll help you with the design. We already have the postal permits. We already know how to process the mail. We have a lot of tools available to us so that you can basically approve the things that we've put together for you. And then you do have to answer the phone.

Evan Uyetake: So that's kind of the other part of it. So like maybe like one of the calls can be whatever the customer, I can't do the actual sales for you, but I'll basically put you in an opportunity to make sales. And that's really kind of where it will come into play when people understand that they get their heads around, that it really just kind of comes down to you. All right. I need to understand how to budget for this. I need to understand how to track this. I need to understand how to make sure that I'm constantly improving the process. If you're willing to put in that time and effort, which you should be for any marketing tactic that you do. But if you're willing to do that, then direct mail becomes a very easy thing to do, and it can be a very effective thing for you.

Clarence Fisher: Very cool. I find it interesting that you said you have to answer the phone and make a sale. I mean, we run into that sometimes where we're generating the leads, but still get into trouble because for whatever reason, maybe the phone's not being answered correctly or just, they don't close. So it ends up looking like that's our responsibility to so much so that I've even considered adding some type of client facing training, or maybe even putting on a service for that. I don't know, have you run into that yourself?

Evan Uyetake: Of point back and say, okay, what went wrong? You know, what did we miss? And so we kind of view that not as our, like taking the blame type of thing. Well, you know, we're, we're going to do our best to put you in the best opportunity for success. But, you know, there's obviously kind of, at some point, our responsibility ends. My responsibility ends when it enters the mail. At that point, then I depend on the post office to actually deliver that piece. I depend on a customer to respond to it and call, and I depend on the business to answer the phone and make the sale. So there's, I'm a part in that, but ultimately it all becomes down to direct mail. And then they'll look at the company that kind of did that part of it and say, okay, you know what potentially happened?

Evan Uyetake: And ignore some of the other, other parts of that. When you get into the sales process, I'm a salesperson. So I can, I have the confidence that I can pretty much sell anything to anybody that I believe in. So if I believe in the product, I know it works. I can, I can sell the snot out of it. And I think for businesses, there's no better sales person than you. You have staked your life and on a product so much so that you're basically saying there's so many options out there of things that I could do to make money. I believe so strongly in this product that I'm going to put my livelihood on it. And I don't think that anybody will ever sell better than you when it comes to something along those lines. If you get a good sales team, if you get a good sales manager and they understand the product, you know, they can be passionate about it, but ultimately coming from you, you're always going to be the best salesperson.

Evan Uyetake: And then it's always going to kind of go slightly downhill from there, us as marketing partners. I want to make sure that we're really good at the things that we do. So when it comes to like printing, when it comes to marketing strategy, when it comes to graphic design and creative and demographic targeting, that's our wheel house sales is a part of what we do, but it kinda ties back into our strengths, which is the marketing side of it. But when it comes to like your product, let's say it's pest control. I'm not going to be necessarily passionate about that. And I would be packing a box. So could I do that for you possibly, but I'm just not, I'm not going to have the expertise and knowledge to really maximize every sale or close every sale, or make sure that that person is getting a really good presentation.

Evan Uyetake: I would depend. And I would say if you're in business and you're wanting to hand that part of your business off to a third party, really take a close look at what that sales process is and what that product is. And is it something that you can do that with? I would venture to say for a lot of things, probably not now on the other side of it, I don't want you taking calls at three in the morning or midnight. So if you have an overflow in after hours answering service or something along those lines, and that's part of your business plan, that's great. You're probably not going to get a lot of sales, but then you're technically available and you're helping people that way, but really look at what your strengths are as a business owner. And that is product knowledge. It should be product knowledge.

Evan Uyetake: It should be building teams, providing solutions to problems and really focusing on those things. And if you're providing solution to a problem, which is anytime we're talking about sales, we're providing solutions to a problem. You want to make sure that you're doing a really good job presenting how you're going to solve that problem, because that's where our value is going to come into play. And a sale happens when value exceeds price. And if you can do that as a salesperson, as a business owner, you're going to get more sales, you're going to have a higher close rate. You're going to have a lower cost per call. You're going to have a lower cost per sale. You're going to have all those different things going for you and have a third party. Do something like that for you. It will never be as good as you doing it yourself or creating a team that really is bought into the mission, vision, values of your business.

Clarence Fisher: That is an excellent answer. And I love that saying when value exceeds price as a sale happens, I love that. So I'm curious having, what are some of the little loan pitfalls or common mistakes that you've seen businesses make on the road to using direct mail? Can you share kind of you know, an example of how you've helped them overcome these obstacles and succeed?

Evan Uyetake: Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna back out a local a little bit and go more national for this one because it's, it's something that for me was really validation to what we were doing as a business. I don't know if business owners run into this, but this is something that I've run into is sometimes when you're in business, your customer takes you for granted. They basically says, well, anybody can do, anybody can put ink on paper and give it to the post office and mail it. And technically anybody can do that. So I knew that we were providing a lot of value to a customer, but at some point they were at a point where they had to make decisions based on some pricing. They had to make some decisions based on like other services that they wanted to provide that were outside of our scope.

Evan Uyetake: And so they kind of made a broad stroke change in the business. So for us, one of our large, larger clients is Dish network and we service their authorized dealer network. So I'm not doing the mail directly for dish network. I'm doing the mail for a local authorized dealer in communities all across the United States. So Dish decided was we're going to take all of our approved partners, which we approved partner at the time. And we're going to kind of throw that program away. And we're going to provide this universal program with this company that does everything for us. So they check boxes, right? So direct mail check. You need your website, check that websites You need your an event scheduled check , They'll do all this stuff. So they're basically took their marketing department and they hand it off to a third party.

Evan Uyetake: That third party essentially said, we can do all of these things for you, which they could, they did. And they did do all of those things for them. But what happened was there was no expertise tied to it. There was no really understanding that customer base, which was the dealers. And so what happened was, is they saw their direct mail response rates plummet, and they saw the direct mail utilization plummet because before me as an approved partner, me as a company, I had to earn that business every single time I worked with that customer, this company had essentially the monopoly they had. If you wanted to do direct mail, you had to do it through them. And so whether it was successful or not, wasn't necessarily what they were there for, they were there to provide the service, kind of see where this is going with that when utilization dropped and when response dropped, that's where all the value that we brought into play kind of started to show up with our demographic targeting with our direct response, like cause corporate started to do more of the things along the lines of a corporate message, but a local authorized dealer, their message is different.

Evan Uyetake: It's where your local guys, we understand our community. We're a part of your community. We know what your hot buttons are. It's not just, we're going to blast, put the brand on there and people will know what the brand is. And there we're going to call that. That's what they did. That sense of urgency went away. A lot of those different things started to dissipate. And so it just became direct mail branding, which again, you can get, they got calls from it. It's not like the campaign just didn't do anything. They still got calls, but it wasn't what they were used to. And so ultimately what happened is about a year and a half later, we had kind of been continuing to engage with them. We never want to burn a bridge. And in those conversations we started kind of hearing some of the challenges that they had.

Evan Uyetake: And so for me, it was like, okay, there's a, some validation of what we were doing. We, the, a lot of the things that we had put into place, I believe were the reasons that our campaigns were that much more successful for those dealers. And so when the program went away from them, they lost all that value. They lost all those different things. And it started to show up in response rates, cost per calls, utilization, everything else. So we ultimately ended up kind of being brought back into that, fold with some side-by-side tests that they did, and just working with some of the dealers that had used us in the past. And since then, we've actually kind of been able to regrow that business from essentially not having it at all anymore to being an integral part of that business because of some of the specialties that we do, that we're helping to overcome some of those challenges that they didn't even know that they had until we were removed from the picture.

Evan Uyetake: And they understood the value of the challenges that we were addressing and the reasons that we were doing things before, it was just like, Oh, well, you just cost more to do it your way. But you know, those things don't really matter. We just need to get the mail out. Now it's a, we need to strategically target. We need to make sure that our message makes sense. We need to make sure that we're emphasizing local. When we're doing smaller campaigns, we're doing more consistency. It's not just, Hey, 10,000 pieces. We're going to drop all that on Monday. It's, let's be strategic with the volume that we have, because let's say, for example, corporate says, Hey, we want you to mail 10,000 pieces of the dealers like, okay, so they mail 10,000 pieces. And let's say that that campaign does really well. Now they've got a ton of calls coming in.

Evan Uyetake: They're super busy. And then as those calls taper off, then they're dead the rest of the month. Whereas if you're building consistency and you're going to have less peaks and valleys in your marketing and your response, which is going to give you a more predictable business model, which you're trying to make payroll, and you're trying to keep a healthy staff and trying to service the needs of everybody in terms of like, Hey, we don't have work for you this week. Well, people aren't going to stick around. If you don't have work for them, I want to make sure that we're being more consistent with that. And then there's some seasonality to things too. You know, when you look at the flooding that we had here in Oklahoma, one month and a half ago, two months ago, what if my campaign was scheduled to mail one week in Sand Springs?

Evan Uyetake: So one week I'm having all my mail to go to Sand Springs and all those people have evacuated. And I'm pretty sure they're not going to get mail. I'm not sure. I don't even know what happened to that now. So I've spent the money, right? Post office did their job. They couldn't deliver it, but everybody did their job. So you still have that advertising cost. Now let's back it up and say, what if we were more consistent, we were going into some , Sand Springs, some to Broken Arrow, some to Owasso, some to Jenks. And we were more strategic with the areas that we were going to. So it wasn't so heavy in one specific area so that if something happens, you know, that's obviously an exaggeration of what could happen, but it can happen. It doesn't negatively impact our business, the same amount as it would have.

Evan Uyetake: If I put all 10,000 pieces in the sand Springs and the bulk of those addresses were wiped out or flooded or whatever else.

Clarence Fisher: So what inspired you to start this, to do this?

Evan Uyetake: To do direct mail or to get in kind of the business that I'm in? Well, kind of goes a little ways back. I originally started in graduating from college kind of jumping right into kind of the business that I'm in here at Troast, but I actually started off doing something a little bit different. My I wasn't in a situation where the things that I thought I was good at or things that I were good, I thought it was essentially like kinda my career path. And what I ultimately found out is as I got through that in college and what my focus, my major was was actually not quite what were things that energize me and brought me life.

Evan Uyetake: So kind of through that entire process, I actually kind of defaulted a little bit back to sales and, uh, started kind of getting opportunities to exercise my creativity through direct mail. And so, as I kind of worked my way through the company and mail became more and more a part of what I was doing in my roles, I started to kind of see it. These are things that energize me. These are things that I enjoy. These are things that, you know, I'm helping people I'm impacting lives, I'm growing businesses. And so kind of through that entire process, the things that I was doing ultimately aligned with my strengths. And so that's kind of what got me into, and that's one of the reasons that, you know, I've done this for 15 years and it's something that I enjoy doing. I enjoy working with small businesses, large businesses, entrepreneurs.

Evan Uyetake: I enjoy kind of being a part of that analytical side, that creativity side, and then creating products that fill those needs. So that's what got me into, it was almost an accident. It was, I needed a job at the time I needed to make money, but as I was able to kind of have people in my lives, saw the strengths that I had and see kind of where I was going in terms of being young and kind of impressionable and moldable at that time, direct mail actually ended up being something that kind of filled a lot of those needs and allowed me to grow into the role that I'm in today.

Clarence Fisher: Awesome. So, so let's just rewind just a little bit. Can you share a lesson that you learned early on in business that impacted how you still impacts how you do things today?

Evan Uyetake: Well, one of the things that I've kind of learned along my journey is that everything that I do is relational. The people that I interact with, the people that the mail pieces are, that are seeing those things. There's people in that process when it comes to printing and timelines and vendor relationships, and ultimately working with customers and business owners, it's all people in the entire process. And so if you don't build what you're doing around people, you're not going to create value. You're not going to be something that's going to be longterm. There's some things that, you know, commodities, right? There's certain things like electricity and water. Like you need those things. But when we come to things like marketing and products that maybe cost a little bit more perceived cost a little bit more people want to do business with people that they like know like and trust, right?

Evan Uyetake: I'm sure you've heard that before. And what I've found is that if you involve people in the entire process and you relate to people, and you're ultimately hearing what you do towards that relationship with people, that's where success comes from. You can put something out there and you can hope it works, but until you really understand the hot buttons that people have, the pain that people have, and you empathize with that and find ways to create solutions to it. That's where success comes from a business owner. And it also comes on a marketing campaign too. So just realizing that we're not just putting it on paper and just sending stuff into the post office, we are helping businesses grow. We are helping entrepreneurs, feed their families and employ people. We're helping people that have needs those businesses. We're helping those businesses communicate to potential customers, the problems that they solve, and ultimately that's creating sales for them.

Evan Uyetake: So that's the high level stuff in terms of what lessons that I've learned. I did learn in direct mail. Make sure you get the phone number, right. I mean, that's one, that's kind of all right. So we get real practical, make sure you proofread. Proofreading is kind of important. And also if I give an approval to a customer and they approve it, I still need to test that phone number. Because what I found is that a lot of times, even though they approve it, and even though they said it was correct, and it's their phone number on that piece, if it doesn't ring to the right place, they're expecting me to even look out for them in some cases. So I we'll still test the phone number to make sure that, right, even though we have a written approval that says, Hey, this was approved. I guarantee you, we both lose. If that phone number is wrong, because now the customer technically did a mail campaign, did everything they did, but they didn't benefit from it. So that's one that I learned very early on test every phone number before you send a print.

Clarence Fisher: That's awesome. I love how you you're because it is so relational. You're looking out for your client.

Clarence Fisher: Even the small ways that they just don't know to look for. I think that's super important.

Evan Uyetake: That's just part of I think that's part of good business. I think about the times that I hear people talk about and you know, we did business on a handshake, you know, those days aren't necessarily gone, but they're definitely rare now, but I think that if you have the right kind of relationship with a business or a vendor or customer or whatever else, and they know that you're going to do what you say you're going to do, they know that you have their best interests in mind and you want to truly help them. Then I think you can do business on a handshake. .

Clarence Fisher: Yeah. So I only had a, I was wrapping up and then something jumped in my mind. So I'm just going to ask these rapid fire kind of.

Evan Uyetake: Sure

Clarence Fisher: What do you feel like is the best kept secret in direct mail?

Evan Uyetake: How to answer these rapid fire?

Speaker 3: No, I just, I know I'm thinking of a lot of time, but that jumped in my head is like what if I could just ask you, what do you feel like the best kept secret is?

Evan Uyetake: I think demographic, which we've already talked about, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of leave what I've said on demographic target targeting as its own thing. I think one of the new things that the post office is doing that I think has a lot of potential and that not a lot of people know about. And especially this is like your little a tidbit for getting this far into the interview, a little nugget that you can take with you that doesn't cost you. Anything is the US post office has released a program called informed delivery. And what informed delivery is, is a way for you to get a scan of everything that's going to be in your mailbox that day. So for me, my house is away away from my mailbox.

Evan Uyetake: And so if I get my mail delivered, it's nice to know it's in the mailbox before it actually is delivered. So what the post office does is they scan all the direct mail pieces, making sure that everything goes through. That's why we use those intelligent barcodes, but they actually have pictures of all the pieces too. And some of that's for a QC control thing. But what they've done is they've taken those scans and they've given you an opportunity to opt in to getting those scans in your email box. When you get those in your email box. Now every morning about nine o'clock I get an email from the post office that shows me every direct mail piece that's going to be in my mailbox. That in itself is kind of cool, but I think the really cool thing as a marketer is what they're doing with that.

Evan Uyetake: So there's a code to my mail pieces and they have my email address. So what the post office has done from a technology standpoint is essentially said, if I, as a marketer and marketing to a specific list, what I can do is I can take and replace that image. Instead of it being like a black and white picture, I can make it a clickable link and I can make it a full color image. So now we're engaging people offline through direct mail and online before the decision maker even gets home and we're being multichannel, MultiTech stick to where they're going to see that mail piece in full color. They have the ability to click on it, which you could take them to a lead page, a funnel, a YouTube video, some sort of additional way to engage that person. Maybe you're capturing the email address. You're not going to get the email address from the us post office, but you can give people an opportunity to opt into your email list. And so it's a really cool program that I think has a lot of potential. You can just go to the US post office site or just Google informed delivery, sign up for it. And you'll start getting those emails in your inbox. And the cool thing is the people that are subscribed to it, it's free. You can actually engage them with a more interactive, direct mail piece.

Evan Uyetake: I know your mind is clicking on it, cause you're now like, Hey, I put a tracking pixel on there. Hey, I, now I reengage and set up an auto email or maybe I give away a free resource, a PDF. I mean, there's, there's a lot of cool things that can come from this. And the next logical step from it goes to where you may be able to through informed delivery, not even mail a piece, but you can mail it. You can target a specific area. And if the people opt into those ads, that's a new form of marketing that can be coming down the pipe as well. And the open rates for the emails are really high. It's like 74% open rate, which is astronomically high dude.

Clarence Fisher: I get informed delivery and I open it every single week.

Evan Uyetake: There you go. Yeah. Have you seen the full color ones that come through they are not many right now.

Clarence Fisher: No. No. They're not. When you said that, I got to thinking like today there were, you know, it was black and white. I think I have seen a full color one, but I wouldn't know that that's what that was. I mean, what you just dropped right now is just, it's crazy because if you can get somebody to click that, I mean, you can retarget them. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff you can do with that.

Evan Uyetake: Exactly. So now what we're doing is we're building a little bit more consistency, right? Cause we're going across marketing channels. We're engaging them in different places. From a branding standpoint, it kind of goes to what you were saying. You see me everywhere. Well, you don't really see me everywhere. You just see me in the places that I want to be. That's where my customers are. That's essentially what you can do. You're in their mailbox. You're in their email box. You go online, you engage them through the website. There's a lot of cool things that you can do there. If they go to the website, you put a tracking pixel on there, you engage Google ads. Now you're following them throughout the internet, wherever they go. So a lot of cool things that can happen with that, a lot of people are probably like super paranoid right now. And they're like, that's how they're following me. But yeah, that's kind of where my mind goes with it. There's a lot of potential.

Clarence Fisher: So awesome, man. Thank you for sharing that. So as we wrap things up, what do you think that our listeners should do in the next 30 days, 90, a year to accomplish their goals with direct mail?

Evan Uyetake: I think the first thing is figuring out who your customer is. I know I've already said that, but that's like imperative. Not just like they drive a Chevy Tahoe and they make $40,000 a year and 50% of them are male. That's not quite your customer. I think you can get a little bit more specific with them, give them a name and then make your marketing decisions based on that person. So if his name's Dean or her name's 3.5 kids or 2.5 kids. So is this something that hits a hot button for them and make your decisions based on that know where she lives, know where she goes to church? What radio stations does she listen to? What magazines does she read? Figure that stuff out and then make your marketing decisions. Based on that. The other thing that I'd say is you really need to hone in, on tracking all of your marketing, not just your direct mail marketing, know where your sales are coming from, what's driving it because I don't know about you, but when I build my budget or when I'm planning my marketing mix, I really want to put that money into things that I know are going to give me the best return on investment.

Evan Uyetake: And I know that like sounds simple and common sense, but you would be surprised the amount of people that I talked to that just say, I need to check that box. And they think that marketing is a check box type of tactic or check box business thing that you need to do. And it's so much more than that. And if you spend the time and invest in it, you know, you start looking at people that are successful in maybe similar industries to what you're, you're doing reverse engineer, what they're doing. Look at the radio stations that they're on. Look at the TV stations or look at the direct mail pieces that they do in some cases buy their product if you can, because now you can watch the entire sales process. And I'm not saying to copy it, but I am saying that reverse engineering, some of the things that work or some of the tactics that they use can be very beneficial and very cost effective. Let's say you got to spend $80 to buy their product. Well, that $80 is an investment in your sales and marketing process.

Clarence Fisher: Funnel hacking.

Evan Uyetake: There's a little funnel hacking in there, but Hey, the principles are the same.

Clarence Fisher: Yes. Yes. That's awesome, man. So what's, what's the, what's the most important question that you feel like the businesses should ask themselves if they're considering integrating direct mail into their marketing strategy, I'm thinking about doing this. The number one biggest question I need to ask myself is what?

Evan Uyetake: I think for businesses that are considering mail. I would strongly encourage them to not have mail replace something that is already successful. So this needs to be like an incremental growth type of thing. So if you are already doing well with whatever marketing tactics that you're doing, don't replace those. Those are kind of your core business. Start with mail as something that like, what can I allocate per month, per week, whatever towards direct mail so that I can grow this depending on your product, it's really going to kind of determine some of your next steps. So if you have a product, like I said, it's air conditioner and it's like a $10,000 product. Then, you know, a prospecting mail campaign is probably going to be something that we can do. That's going to make a lot of sense for you if you're selling, if you're a restaurant and you're wanting to target your local area with coupons and get foot traffic and you have a high lifetime value on those customers is probably a pretty good thing.

Evan Uyetake: If you're selling hats ,mails probably not the, like if that's your core business, there's not enough value in there, not enough return on investment, on direct mail for something like that, you're going to have to sell a lot of hats to cover it. So kind of look at some of the things that you're doing and make sure that mail makes sense services industries great. Like obviously said the restaurants, those kinds of things. We have a lot of realtors that use it for selling homes and in terms of very small volume, quantity of mail going out car, you see a lot of car dealers, a lot of direct mail is used for political stuff. So kind of look at some of the marketing tactics that are utilizing direct mail and say, Hey, does, does my product fit this? Because if you're selling a very low priced item and it's not something that someone's going to continually, re-engage you with mail might not be the best thing.

Evan Uyetake: Maybe look on social media, maybe look at email marketing, maybe look at, you know, a billboard. We got a ton of dispensaries popping up here, and I think they're keeping the billboard business going, but you know, it's an effective way for these guys to get their message out there targeting that kind of customer. It might be a little difficult with mail. So kind of consider what your product is. Now. I'll say this, if you're a dispensary and you have a client list and you want to continually reengage that client list, that's a fantastic use of direct mail. If you have a really good list, let's say you're a nonprofit and you have a donor base that's again, mail is very personal, very targeted. You have that ability to do that. So really look at what you're selling, what you're doing and even look at what your competition is doing. And if they're doing a lot of mail, then you probably should start asking yourself as mails, part of what my marketing mix should be.

Clarence Fisher: Absolutely. And the last question, actually, when you said dispensary in the billboards, I was thinking that too. I mean, there's social media and like ad-words and you know, they're not allowing those guys to advertise yet,

Evan Uyetake: Right? Yeah. So mail could be a very viable thing for them. It's just, I would say it's probably going to be more geared towards a customer list. A prospecting thing is probably not going to be the best return on investment for them. It can be something that you use to build your list, but it's going to cost a lot of money to do that. If you already have your list, if you've collected it, then you reengage them. We actually have done some stuff in the past for casinos, for some of the gaming machines and re we re-engage their player's club, those return response rates on those pieces where like in the sixties to 70% astronomically high. So that's the power of a good list and an engaged customer. And those campaigns easily paid for themselves. Cause once they let's say they gave away $10 in free play, that person is going to spend more than $10 of that machine.

Evan Uyetake: And so you just gotta kind of look at what's my product, what's the lifetime value. What's the, what's the return on investment because you know, there's some cheap things you can do out there too. I mean you can do some really cost-effective stuff like door hangers, yard signs, you can do some events, those kinds of things. Those are low cost ways to get your get in and get started. If you're at that point in your business, maybe that's the best way to get started. But, you know, start looking towards building on top of that. And then I would say increment, Maryland on from there, it's typically not the first thing that people do.

Clarence Fisher: Okay, man, I love marketing. So I've decided that direct mail is right for me. And now how what's the most important thing that a business needs to consider when they're evaluating direct mail agencies?

Evan Uyetake: I think for me, and so I'm in the industry, so it's a a little bit different for me, but I would look really closely at their interaction with me. Do they just want to print and mail and just like, Hey, give me the art and give me your list and I'll mail it. Those guys do see some success if the customer is very knowledgeable on exactly what they want to do, most customers that I've talked to are not, most customers need a little bit of hand holding, meet some , need some expertise kind of along with the sales process that it takes to get a mail campaign out. And so I'd pay attention to the questions that they're asking you is, do they have, are they anticipating your needs? Are they presenting things like informed delivery? Are they presenting things like ways that you can improve your campaign?

Evan Uyetake: Or are they just wanting to take an order if they're just wanting to take an order, nothing against those guys, but there's not going to be a lot of added value. And when there's not a lot of added value, it's a dependent on you to make that campaign successful. We're a little bit different. So obviously I'm going to, I'm going to say for us, we're going to ask a lot of questions and we're gonna, we're going to try to propose and present things to help you get the best possible response because a lot of people can print and mail. There's a lot of direct mail companies out there, but what we've found, especially kind of through, the success that we've had in terms of having customers leave us and come back and everything else is it's the expertise and the understanding of the industry that really helps take a good campaign to a great campaign through demographics, through calls to action, senses of urgency, through things like informed delivery, those kinds of things really help you take your campaign to the next level.

Evan Uyetake: And it's their job to be experts in that field. And if they're an expert in that field, they're going to want to help you. The other ones, they just want to process your mail and get it out. It will get done. And they'll probably do a good job of just turning it around, but you're just not going to, probably in my opinion, you're not going to get the best result out of that because there's a lot of things that you just don't know and you don't know what you don't know and it it'll show up in the results.

Clarence Fisher: I agree, man. How do we find out more about you?

Evan Uyetake: Well, there's one reason that I really like podcasts and that's because I have my own podcast. So young business leader, podcasts, it's on Stitcher iTunes and SoundCloud young business leader podcast. So that's one way to kind of hear more from me. I don't always talk about mail.I actually don't talk a lot about mail or marketing on that. It's more of talking about some of the clues that success leaves behind and that entrepreneurial leadership journey. So there's that, uh, you can always go to LinkedIn and find me, Evan Uyetake. You can connect with me there and then obviously you can learn a lot more about Trost marketing. It just www.trostmarketing.com.

Clarence Fisher: Man, Evan, thank you so much for spending all this time and talking about, I got so much as I can't wait to share it. Go to the show notes and you'll see all my notes there. And I can't wait to, uh, to share this. So, I mean, I will, I think I'll talk to you Friday or something, right?

Evan Uyetake: Yeah. So a little indirect plug I'll be actually reversing the roles. I'll be asking the questions and having Clarence answer some of the things that he's learned along his leadership and entrepreneurial journey. So we'll definitely be talking then and hopefully be posting that soon. So you guys can get a double dose of me and Clarence.

Clarence Fisher: Awesome. Looking forward to it. All right, man. Well, I'll talk to you later.

Evan Uyetake: Alright, thanks.

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