Getting to Decision Makers with Handwritten Notes by SimplyNoted | Ep 51

0:00This is episode 51, and on it, I have Rick Elmore, the owner of simplynoted.com, on to talk about strategies to get a hold of decision makers and increase response rates through the use of handwritten cards.

0:14Rick Elmore:This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough Podcast. I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last.

0:32Hey, I'm excited to dig in today. I've got a unique approach with this episode. I was reached out by this guest's agency to get on and talk about marketing and their business and anything that's under the sun. But when he and I connected, it was an obvious fit because so many business owners I deal with struggle to figure out how to get in front of decision makers and do it in a meaningful way. And we all know how costly and messy the digital world is. But Rick's built a really fascinating business that I think is perfectly suited for so many of my clients and so many of you listening. How do you get in front of decision makers?

1:11How do you stand out? How do you stand out from the crowd? And how do you do it in a sustainable, scalable way? And we'll talk on a lot of marketing strategy. But Rick, I would love for you to just talk a little bit about Simply Noted and what makes you guys so unique, because it's a very fascinating business model. And I think a lot of people listening will find it really intriguing and hopefully use it to not selling me out of the out of the gate. But I'd love for you to give a bit of an overview on why it captured my interest so well.

1:36Rick Elmore:Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Josh. It's great to be here. About 10 years ago, I was going through my MBA at the University of Arizona. At that time, I was in my corporate career and I was looking for something else. So I went back to school and about a year into my program. I was a sales rep at the time. I was in a marketing class and I had a marketing professor going through all the success rates in marketing. And I was pretty young. I was like 27 at the time. And I really was still learning business. But he was going through all these numbers. Through direct mail, cold calling, knocking doors, all the traditional marketing ways that are out there.

2:13Rick Elmore:And everything was like single digits, low double digits, not exciting. I was just like, man, this is really boring. I'm so glad I'm in sales and not marketing. That sounds terrible. But he ends this three-hour lecture with a very important sentence that redirected my life and changed my life. And I think for anybody my age and older, I think they're going to resonate with this. He ends this three-and-a-half-hour lecture. And at the time, I don't think he knew what he was doing. But he says, hey, guys, you know what works better now, if not better than ever, is a good old-fashioned handwritten note.

2:46Rick Elmore:They're rare. They get opened almost 100 % of the time. He threw out the set, 99%. They have nostalgia. The mailbox is empty. At that time, we were going through the software revolution. Now we're going through the AI revolution. And people are starving for something different. They're starving for a human-human connection. And something like this plants a seed in their brain and doesn't go away. And I just thought that resonated. You know, I grew up. I didn't get a cell phone until I was 16. I wrote handwritten notes to kids in my class. And I thought if there was a way to scale that or automate it, there'd be a business case for it.

3:20Rick Elmore:And I started Googling literally right there in that class. I saw someone had a handwritten mail business for weddings. I was like, terrible idea. One-time clients, bridezillas, tight budgets, you know, hurry up and wait. And then there was like a company. They're still around, but they do like B2C, you know, send your mom a card. I was like, why is nobody focusing on businesses? They have systems, they have budgets, they have needs, they're always trying to grow. Like, why isn't people implementing this? So I tested it. I bought a pen plotter from China. They're called a little three-axis plotter.

3:52Rick Elmore:I built it at home. uh took me about a month to write 500 of these i don't know if this is gonna be a video podcast no it's not but yeah okay just a envelope card envelope with a handwritten font yeah address yep took me about a month with this little one robot to write 500 but i sent them out to uh some doctors at that time who were like on my like targeted list and my quota was$50 ,000 a month. And within six weeks, I sold like$300 ,000 in sales. And these doctors were calling me back like, Rick, thanks for the note. I was like, no one's ever done this before. Like, hey, that was awesome. Like, that was cool to get.

4:33Rick Elmore:Like, book a meeting and let's talk about this. And if you're in sales and you have your client calling you to book meetings, that's pretty exciting. Yeah, that's like when I had my entrepreneurial seizure. I was like, hey, idea proven. like I've tested it. It works. Now I'm going to go build the world's best handwritten mail platform. Fast forward eight years. I think we've done that. That's great. Yeah. So I think like you said that with that digital revolution, I mean, 10 years ago, that was like Facebook was taking over the world with Facebook ads. They had all the data on our phones. Everybody was getting targeted.

5:09and then Google was scrambling to stay relevant and everybody under the sun was running paid media traffic. And I think as we've gone, I think the nostalgia is a great angle, but I also think like the fact that the mailboxes are empty. Like, I mean, the only thing in there right now that I get is the weekly newspaper mailer with all the coupons that just goes straight into the trash. And I think like, as I think of all the businesses that I've helped over the years, there's very, very few that wouldn't benefit from this exact approach. I was just on a call with a guy who has a business that he handles affiliate lead reselling.

5:54So he's got affiliates that have excess leads and he's got home service companies. And as we were thinking about his target audience, like it's shooting fish in a barrel. He just needs to go after the top players in each market that will buy all the leads from him. And so I gave him a task, go get his co-work agent to go scrape all the sites and pull together the contacts of who the biggest advertisers are and be able to go and get directly in front of him. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. And so like for somebody like him, this is a no brainer because he said, well, how do I get in front of him?

6:26Do I run paid ads to him? I'm like, no, literally just, it was an old Dan Kennedy line I heard was send him a FedEx letter with$100 stapled to it, like you just send a FedEx letter with$100 stapled to it, you're going to get a response.

6:40Rick Elmore:Yeah. A friend of mine owns a business. I've seen that happen. I was like, your time's worth money. I won't waste it or something. I forgot what it was. I was like, that is smart. Like put a$100 bill in there. Of course, someone's going to like reach back out. Yeah, that's a good idea. I came across that idea years ago. I was teaching at Fresno State and I was teaching a business plan writing class and we were going over the marketing section. And And at the time, we're in Central California, there's a lot of ag. And at the time, I counted this one fungicide company for almonds had six billboards up and down the highway.

7:10So you figure they're four grand a pop, they're spending 24 grand a month. And they may have hundreds of thousands of people seeing those billboards every day, but how many of them are almond farmers? And how many of them are dealing with a fungus issue or whatever? and I said how different would it be if you just pulled the list of all the almond farmers yeah and you mailed them a letter just like you did a handwritten letter but I said mail them a letter stapled with a hundred dollar bill I'm pretty sure it'll be less than$24 ,000 and you'll get a much higher response rate than six billboards sitting on the side of the highway right yeah so that's awesome that you're able to prove the concept in your own sales experience and have those doctors respond so what do you find like the campaigns who are the target audiences that you've seen where this has worked really well yeah it's always the all the service-based

8:01Rick Elmore:relationship-driven businesses so like non-profit political real estate insurance financial you know where there's so much competition right and where a relationship you know if it's a 50-50 tie relationship can really push people over when you receive something like that the mail even if you don't have a relationship, you're starting out on the right side of the table. You know, just like with some of these doctors I never worked with, if they have 10 reps calling on their office, but one sends in the handwritten note, who's going to stand out? So our best clients are usually those service-based businesses, but people use us for relationship building, thank you cards, anniversary of working together, holidays, birthdays.

8:41Rick Elmore:Those are some of our longest, most tenured clients. but then we have like our transactional onesie twosie maybe three or four campaigns a year where people are using us for like direct mail like larger just because the open rate so high the cost per piece may be a little bit higher at volume but the open rate's higher the response rate's higher it's a different piece than what they're usually used to getting so it's more of like a tactical tool in your tool belt i don't say it's the end-all be-all marketing piece but like any healthy business that has survived over decades knows you have to dabble in every spot.

9:17Rick Elmore:You have to dabble in social, you have to dabble in ads, you have to dabble in a client retention budget. I mean, you just have to be reinvesting everywhere because sometimes Google ads is not going to be working out and you're going to have to rely on some referrals or lower churn rate or, you know, social or cold con, whatever it is, direct mail. Right. So I think it's just mostly is just from my experience of running this business for eight years is for client retention, relationship building and then like client acquisition for like direct mail marketing yeah no that's great and so how segmented how small can you guys get on automations versus batches because i mean there's different stages of clients i could think of a number of clients where maybe they send out a anniversary card for keep a client staying with them for over a year and so that's every month there may be 50 or 100 cards going out how do you guys handle that kind of onesie-twosie segmentation or stuff like that.

10:12Rick Elmore:Yeah, I mean, we service the whole market. That's probably like a big thorn in our side probably for like why we haven't scaled because we will literally, anybody can go to our website and send one card. The way our system is built, it's fully automated. So it doesn't matter if a million people send one card or a million automated orders come through, our production can handle it. There's no human intervention. It's all done by scanners and cameras. We have essentially built like the constant contact of handwritten mail. and I feel like I keep saying this and they're going to call me and like threaten to sue me.

10:41They're archaic. They're so old. They're not paying attention to anything anymore.

10:44Rick Elmore:Well, then maybe I should stop saying that. But I'm just saying we have, you know how email is so trackable and automatable and so customizable? That is what we've done in handwritten mail. It's never been done. The reason it's never been done is because where most print mail start and finishes. So like print mail starts and ends at the printer because everything's done on a PDF. It prints, they cut it and they just drop it off the post office. we have to go multiple steps further. We have to print it, cut it, score it, write it, stuff it, write it envelopes, put a real stamp on it. So there's so many more steps involved.

11:18Rick Elmore:And there's so many different places where errors can happen. But what we've done is we built our system that runs on scanners and cameras. So when a piece of mail gets loaded, there's a little invisible code. You can't see it because it's like an invisible ink. It gets scanned. It communicates with our server. Our server says, oh, that card's been loaded. It needs to write this message with these variables in this handwriting style. And then it writes it, a camera above it, quality controls it. That's fascinating. And then we do like, yeah, it is. And then we insert it into an envelope. And then there's another invisible code put on the envelope.

11:52Rick Elmore:Then we rerun the cards and write the envelope and put a stamp on it and send it out. And it's all trackable. So we track mail to the mailbox. So just like how you can track emails to be delivered. And then we track QR code scans. So just like tracking a link click in an email. So if someone scans a QR code, you get notified. You can automate a text message to that person. You can automate an email to that person. You can automate an update in your CRM, a workflow automation. So I think we've built a really robust platform, but it takes somebody who understands automation to get it or who's been in this product before.

12:25Rick Elmore:So that's another probably reason we've had a hard time scaling. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense because I think the bulk mail, the large print houses that can upload by single graphic. They're merging with 100 ,000 addresses. They're printing it all at once with the variable data. And then they're just dropping it off with a pre-sort type of thing. That effort in itself is enough for most marketing directors or marketing officers to stress out that to try to come up with the variations that you provide, it's almost like decision fatigue kicks in because there's too many options. there's too many variables there's too many potential outcomes potential ways to use this tool it is the swiss army knife of direct marketing essentially it is i think you just nailed it i haven't heard anybody explain it so easily in a while it's just decision fatigue because there's so much that you can do and just like people stress out over mail i've lived in it for eight years so i just like it doesn't stress me out anymore but like there's a lot that goes into it just like you know the copy you know yeah i mean i had a mortgage brokerage and people freak out about a mortgage and i'm like i'm doing 10 a month and they're like doing one every eight years right so it's like a different yeah normal but anyway so you're talking about the copy yeah i'm just saying like once you print it you can't change it you know so like just making sure the design's right all the qr codes work all the attribution and tracking for landing pages It's phone numbers, right?

13:59Rick Elmore:Yeah, the syncing of the whole system. The syncing, right? Well, and then I think the beauty of you guys being able to do onesie twosies, it reduces the risk of print because that's the problem of so many print shops. You're like, oh, well, I get a discount if I do 10 ,000 units instead of 5 ,000 units. So I'm going to do that. And it's like, well, we mailed the first hundred and we found a typo. and or it flopped after a thousand and i don't want to spend send the other nine thousand and so now we've got all this wasted material yeah or you think well i only have the budget for x so i'm going to put it all into this one mailer and then see if it works and i'm sure you get that too of people they're like thinking that they're just putting it all on black and hoping it hits and if it doesn't they're they're broke right yeah we all have those yeah i mean nothing works overnight No.

14:53Rick Elmore:I was just talking to somebody, we hired a new hire a few weeks ago. And it's like, it's amazing what you can do in 10 years. Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. And it's like, you just have to stay consistent and just keep pivoting, iterating, and adjusting, and evolving. And those are the people that figure it out. It's not the, I tried it once, it didn't work. Like nothing works the first time. The first time you rode a bike, did it work? First time you got on the piano, did it sound good? the first time you tried cooking something did it work like but for whatever reason that logic doesn't apply to business to people like oh i showed up for two weeks i didn't like the job i don't like it doesn't work i'm like nothing works until you make it work i would tell clients all the time when they'd say oh i want to get into paid traffic or whatever i'm like do you have six months and like fifty thousand dollars because like yeah it's gonna take some trial and error and you're gonna or the worst was they they'd have a direct mail campaign that they want to turn online and i'm like it's not the same psychology it's not the same mechanics like you you can't expect to convert that direct mail into digital all of a sudden and have it convert one to one or be replaced each step so so i would say not that you're asking for my advice but i would say it'd be fascinating if you guys offered like a almost like a marketing strategist type i know we've talked about it so basically like you guys you guys are concierging like the best practices and charging a little bit of a premium, but you're baby-stepping companies into it.

16:21Rick Elmore:Basically like a playbook. Like, hey, we're going to do two things. We're either going to do lead generation for your client retention. That's it. This is all it is. And it's like... It reduces the decision fatigue. I feel like I could talk to you for like two hours about strategy because I know you consult. And it's like, this is like a volley of conversation that can evolve. But it's like, we need to do that. But what got us off the ground was doing everything for everybody. But that doesn't scale. Like we would take... Yeah. it doesn't scale and we're past that right yeah right well and that's the conversation i just had with the guy that's doing the affiliate platform he's at a point now where they're profitable it's good but if they keep taking on the existing clients that they've had they're just going to get death by a thousand cuts like it's the mosquitoes right and so i told him i said your top five percent of clients you just need that to be the bar of everybody else that you bring on going forward and they should be able to scale probably 5x in the next two to three years if they do that strategy but the problem you know why most business owners won't do it rick it's boring yeah it is so boring most business owners have add2 they're like they do shiny shiny shiny shiny so it's like really and like they just need two sales reps a high application filter and targeting to go after those top prospects and then play those prospects against each other because they're in a finite marketplace and like that playbook works but it's really boring to stick to it when there's all these new innovative ideas you can add and things like that so i know you didn't get on to have me consult with you but i think the playbook is obvious from my perspective of like you've perfected the system you've perfected the tech you've got plenty of case studies.

18:06And I think, like you said, adding handwritten notes into a marketing suite, a marketing kind of package of everything else that you do, like it's a really, really useful tool. And I think that's really impressive.

18:20Rick Elmore:Yeah. So golden nugget, I'm going to take away from this. I just I think you just nailed it on the head. That's fun. I'm glad. I think getting back to the campaigns, obviously, the decision fatigue is a challenge. Knowing like, oh, my gosh, there's a leaveny bajillion things I could do. I think like you said, getting leads or retaining clients is great. And like I can think of a client right now, he's got a really high-end landscape business in Virginia. He should totally do this for retention. Like twice a year, get a handwritten note out just thanking people in the off season. But the end of the season, at the beginning of the season, like, hey, I'm so grateful for you.

18:54I hope to serve you wonderfully this year and like have that be a lead to have a conversation with his sales team, like of how else they can serve them. But for the lead gen side, the question I always get from business owners is, how do I generate a list? Like, how do I find a target list? So talk to me about different models, different examples. I'd love to know why you think it's easy. And yeah, let's go from there. And it's not just every door direct mail in a 25 mile radius, right?

19:23Rick Elmore:So, you know, everybody always thinks about external, right? Problems are external. It's because of that, they, them, everything right. It's external. But a lot of your problems, a lot of your best leads, it's internal. Over eight years, we have a list of people who've come to our website, signed up, placed an order, done a demo of 130 ,000 people. So we know those people already know who we are. Every business has something like that. And there's so many things that you can do with that list. You need to constantly update that list, constantly enrich that list, constantly engage that list, provide value, tons of value, not always just asking, but you can retarget that list on ads.

20:04Rick Elmore:You can retarget that list on meta. You can do direct mail to that list. Oh, I don't have their address. It doesn't matter. You can enrich and get their address. So that's the number one problem I hear for B2B lead generation. It's like, oh, I don't have their address. How do you enrich that now? Yeah. What do you do? So there's a service called People Data Labs. I mean, there's tons of them out there, but we use People Data Labs. As long as you have a first name, last name, and an email, these big data, like companies who just sell data, all they do is build tons and tons and tons and tons of data.

20:32Rick Elmore:Every time you fill a form, you sign up for a company, you fill out a W-2, you sign up for a new credit card, they're aggregating all this data on you and then they broker data to marketing and like, I mean, that's like what Facebook does too. They get all this data and the algorithm gets super smart. And don't they all just pull it from Palantir anyway? I mean, I don't know. I don't know. But I'm just saying like you can take your data and reach your data. It's all there. And I would start with your own list first, you know, so take your own email list, enrich it, get their socials, engage on them on socials, retarget them on ads, retarget them on meta, send them direct mail and just start there.

21:10Rick Elmore:Yeah. Well, and I tell all my clients that I recruit top salespeople, they say, well, what do we do for the first like 90 days? I'm like, go back to every prospect that you sent a quote to over the last three years and just have them follow up with them. Yeah. go through all your old invoices, all your old clients, all like there's, there's a gold mine sitting under your nose. It's just like, it's right here, but you can't see under your nose, right? But I heard, I heard somebody got ranked in chat GPT for organic SEO or AI SEO. Don't I need to spend time on that? I do spend time on it, but I think in order to survive the long term, you have to be able to do everything.

21:47Rick Elmore:Like you have to be able to do SEO. You got to be able to pay attention to what's evolving. I'm all in on AI. Same here. I literally have three agents right now working on this. I don't know if you've done Open Claw yet. I have. I've played with it. I've got Cowork running right now. Cowork is my... Open Claw is good. It was a little too much for me a couple weeks ago, and so I've stuck with Cowork. But yeah, Open Claw is the siren song that is just sitting there waiting. Yeah, it is. I think it was the AI iPhone moment about a month ago. I think so too. And my only problem is that it looks like open AI chat GPT.

22:25They're already bottomed. Bottom, yep.

22:28Rick Elmore:So I feel like we could, I don't want to say we're kindred spirits, but I can have like all these like different conversations. Like I feel like we just have similar interests. I just think, you know, the next five years, anything that can be done on a computer truly is going to be done by an AI agent. So you're really going to have to know how to play with, run AI, build with AI, manage AI. I agree, 100%. Yep. And these, I mean, I just got OpenClaw a week ago and I'm having a hard time sleeping because like I'm excited. Yeah. Because of like the information arbitrage opportunity here, right? Because like if you know how to use it, you're going to be able to go and consult with these businesses and help them implement it.

23:02You'd be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, right?

23:05Rick Elmore:Yeah. But like on the other side, I'm scared because I know how many of my own family that's non-technical. Yes. There's a great article I read on Twitter the other day. I'm going to look it up while we're talking because it was the antithesis of the dystopian Doomer outcomes of everything. And it was related to all of the benefits of breakthrough innovation. And I'm just going to reference a point that they talked about the loom, the knitting loom that was invented in the 1500s. And that the inventor of it went to Queen Elizabeth I. and yeah there it is it's called uh the scene versus the unseen by conor boyack b-o-y-a-c-k it's great it's at 2.3 million views but his was he talked about we all get scared of the first order impact right and so queen elizabeth saw the knitting loom and she said no i cannot accept this it will put too many women out of jobs right and i think he said it got pushed off like decades And then once the knitting loom did capture the market in England, England became the textile exporter of the world.

24:21And the second and third order effects and the markets that were created. And so that was this author's take on AI that we're all afraid. I see it. I'm afraid for friends and family as well.