August 22, 2011

Crest Fruit Direct Mail

Slicing up generations.

Crest Fruit is a quality mail order marketer of Texas Ruby Red grapefruit and other orchard-grown produce products, as well as holiday food gifts. The company operates under several trade names such as Red Cooper and Harry’s Orchards. 

This “traditional” mail-order company relies extensively on acquisition direct mail to grow its customer list. Accordingly, the company has established a long track record of testing promotional offers, mailing lists, and creative strategies. In a nutshell, the Crest Fruit management team knows what it’s doing in the world of direct mail.

Crest Fruit retained Brent Green & Associates to evaluate its current direct mail “control” package and recommend new creative strategies that would appeal to Boomers. (The current control performs best with adults 67+ – members of either the Silent or GI Generations.) To make this assignment even more challenging, Crest Fruit tested our creative solution against a package developed by one of the greatest names in direct mail copywriting. No small challenge.

As a teaser, here is our envelope concept. The graphics may appear slightly milky to you because the eye-catching printed brochure rests inside a high-impact translucent envelope. Ask yourself: if this envelope landed in your home-delivered mail, would you open it? 

(Click on any image below to see it larger in a separate window.)

Inside the package you discover a roll-folded brochure. Imagine that each of the next five photos is one continuous brochure:

Most seasoned direct mail experts will affirm that the sales letter can be the most powerful way to communicate a brand image and create desire for the product. Notice how our letter maintains a laid-back, folksy tone without becoming overly cheesy.

A Business Reply Card or BRC closes the sale when the offer is right and the offer has been presented in a compelling way. We even gave Red Cooper a wife, Betty, who shares her family recipe for grapefruit vinaigrette salad dressing (a nice value-added bonus):

How’d we do? Our direct mail package beat the client’s control by 20% for initial response. Surpassing an existing direct mail control is almost as sweet as our client’s amazing grapefruit, especially when beating a winning package conceived by the nation’s leading direct mail creative strategist and copywriter.

 

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