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Welcome back guys. I got another ad for you today we're going to unpack. This one came right out of the little penny saver thing, so we're going to go into the trenches on this ad and see what we get. So let's unpack it right after this.

Okay, welcome back guys. This one that we're going to look at and dissect came right out of the little penny saver book thing that comes in the mail. So we haven't actually done a lot of direct mail stuff on the channel this year, but some of us out there are doing direct mail and there's definitely some overlap to the digital world and a lot of the same rules apply, right? Good copywriting, good imagery, good messaging, good offers. So let's take a look at what we got here. We're going to pull this one up and this, I don't know how big a one is. They may be all over the country. You guys may be familiar with this or not, I don't know, but this is a standard service company direct offer ad and it popped out to me mainly because it does a couple of things, right, and it does a couple of things wrong just when I first saw it.

So I kind of pulled it out of the thing and saved it. Snipped a picture. We got it up here on the screen. So let's just walk through here, take a second, digest this thing, see kind of what stands out. We got the call outs up top here. Best prices, best parts, best warranty. I love making claims. Nothing wrong with making a claim on your ad. These guys are saying they're the best on these three things. Great, totally subjective, but also fairly powerful copy, and we're just leading the top of the ad here with that, which is nice. Then they got their logo kind of tucked in here. And one thing I will say about this is logos don't make money. Logos do not get a lot of response, unless you're already a big aspirational brand like Louis Vuitton or something like that. Then the logo is worth something.

But for the rest of us in the regular world, our logo is not going to make people buy from us. So these guys did a pretty smart job of kind of tucking it in here and it's there, but it's not taking up a lot of dominant space, which is something I caution everybody with that sort of screams amateur hour. When you're a small business, your logo's not that recognized. Nice to get a little brand impression and at the same time, that's not going to be the reason people buy from you. So be careful with overuse of your logos and making your logo take up a bunch of real estate that otherwise could be used in this case to talk about your offers. So they were conservative with that and I would say that's a good thing. So if you're doing your logo gigantic, probably better use of that space.

So here we go. We got three offers on this thing, so they're really trying to get more than one person, so they're not screening off any traffic, $200 off any door replaced, 59 95 tuneup special. I guess your garage door needs that. That's cool. And then a hundred dollars off a garage door opener. And I assume that's the thing that's installed on the ceiling right now, not just the clicker. I don't even think those are worth a hundred dollars, so I get it. So there's like three things here. Replace the door, replace an opener, and then just what I would call a regular service call here for 59.95. I like the big number up top with strong, big fat, attractive eye, catching number, 200 doors off. If you guys have big numbers you can work with, put 'em up top because they're going to strike hard to strike fast on an ad like this where you only got a little bit of time where somebody's flipping through.

So they did a good job there and they kind of made that the big one. This 59 95, this is a little interesting because you have a round number here, 200, round number here, 100, and then this one is one of these janky numbers. That's not $60, but it sounds like less 59.95. Okay, so we're playing some sort of math game with everybody. I'm not sure I would've done that here. It feels a little out of balance. Something's off and who knows what the decision making was on that, but I would say just by my interpretation feels a little awkward, but I do like that there's three offers that address maybe three different types of needs.

Now here's my criticism for this and something to think about. There are in advertising, two ways to express a discount. You can do a cash off, which we have here as an example on this ad.

And the other thing you see a lot is a percentage off 20, 30%, 15% off, yada, yada, yada, right? A lot of times we do ads because different people's minds work different ways. We like to have a discount expressed as a percentage and as a cash value in the same ad so that people that respond to percentages off will respond to the ad. And people that respond to hard dollar figures off are attracted to the ad as well. In this ad right here, we didn't really play into the person that is looking for a nice percentage off a person that thinks in percentages. And strangely enough, there are people that are just wired different ways. Some of us look at the $200, and that's a big number for us. Others, and this is the way to think about this. Other people look at $200, they're like, eh, it's not that much money.

But if you show 'em up here that $200 off is 10% on a door replacement and maybe it is maybe a door's $2,000, then that means a lot to them because they know it's a big number and the 10% of a big number is another big number. So they're doing the math that way. So you got to be careful and think about that when you're structuring your cash off deals that sometimes, and there are many buyers that think in terms of percentages, because these little a hundred dollars, $200 things are just not that meaningful for them. So if you've got a home that's $2 million, do you care about a $200 discount? Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but I'm guessing that that type of buyer probably is looking for a 15 20% discount. That kind of rings a little bit more with that type of person.

Perhaps it's something to think about. So if you're putting together deals like this, consider that you test your ad with both types of framework, percentage and hard dollar. Okay? That's the last thing I'll say to that. The rest of it implied call to action. It doesn't say call today. It doesn't say free. I mean they're a little loose on the CTA here, and I think it could have been stronger, but clearly they have nice phone number. It is clear, the website's clear, right? But they could have said, call today, or some sort of actual overt directions on what to do next because remember our ingredients for this, here's what we got, here's why it's good for you, and here's how to get it right. Those are the three ingredients here. We've got claims, deals, deals, deals, and then I guess you call to get the deal.

I mean, it's kind of implied, so I get it. But I think it's also worth when you have a call to action saying it clearly, this is what you need to do to get the deal. Call today, go online today, emails today, whatever the deal is, whatever they need to do to get it, you should say it. So not bad. And definitely one that we've seen. If you guys are trying to put together something like this, look at some of the other things I'll say. Careful with these types of print ads in general, getting overly busy. That's one of the symptoms I see all the time with these print flip through magazine mailer things is just trying to do so much crap on one ad that it gets kind of crazy. And you can see there's a little tendency here. There's like three deals on one thing.



It's like, ah. So think that through and make sure you don't go off the side of the road trying to do too much in one piece. Put your best foot forward, try to hit hard with that and see how you do. I think people, whatever the investment of the ad is, they think I better try everything to get my money back or get a return on it. So there's a little tendency to do that, but I would caution to be more surgical and less shotgun approach and be mindful of what you're putting into the market that's going to target the type of customer you want to attract and not try to be maybe everything to everybody just out of some sort of paranoia that you're not going to get a return on it. Okay, so hopefully you guys learned something from this today. Tell me if I'm wrong in the go or if you've got a suggestion or something else to share. And of course, if you have an ad that we'd like to look at and it might even be your ad, go ahead and kick it over to us. Be happy to throw it up on the channel and see what we learned from that. If not subscribe like the channel. Maybe share this to somebody that has a service company that is thinking about doing some advertising. We'll see you on the next one.