When you’ve mailed people several times and they still haven’t bought anything from you, there is always the temptation to mail the same stuff again. After all this time they might just be ready to buy – just as lots of other people have done before them.

As a tactic it can work – but it suffers from diminishing returns, and ultimately you get to the stage where you have mailed the potential customer half a dozen times or more and they still don’t reply.

What’s happening at this point is that the recipient is seeing the email or the direct mail piece and within a second is thinking, “oh its, XYZ Ltd, seen that, not relevant, in bin” and that is where it goes.

The only way to get around this is to write something utterly different – not just a simple change of phrase, but a whole change of direction.

But the big problem with this solution is that it looks very scary. I say this deliberately because I have had more rejections from clients of the emails, letters and brochures that I have written for them, which are seeking to solve this particular issue (that the reader has already seen the promotions many times) than anything else I write.

“But it doesn’t talk about us,” says my client. “This isn’t the image we put across,” “we don’t write like this,” and so on. “I don’t think we could say that,” they say, and I ask, “why not?” and they say, “It’s just not us.”

And the point is always – “how much do you want these sales?” I don’t lie in these pieces, I don’t promise things that are not true. I don’t make wild claims. But I just go “somewhere else” and that can bring in the sales. But if somewhere else is too scary, then ok, don’t go there. You can always save money by not mailing the people you have mailed already, because the chances are they are not going to buy if you send them the same stuff again.

What made me think of all this was the text I wrote recently for Perform, the theatre company. They, I am glad to say, didn’t reject my radical change of approach, and tried exactly what I said. Today I got an email from their MD, Will Barnett, which said that organisations “who have been ignoring us for years are suddenly picking up the phone…”

It’s always nice to know one can still do it.

So overall I’d say, yes it is possible to sell to those who have resisted in the past – but it takes a bit of rethinking. If you are stuck with this problem of reaching people who have heard from you many times before, do give get in touch. A good way to start is to let me see what you have done before (just email Tony@hamilton-house.com) and give me your phone number and details of the people you are mailing, and I will call you back.