Using “direct mail marketing” to contact potential clients is a very effective way to market your private investigator services to potential clients.

This week’s video and blog comes from one of the people who’s gotten my course The Investigator’s Ultimate Guide to Process Serving.

In that course I recommend using “snail mail” to contact law firms you’d like to work for.

So this prospective process server emails me and says…

“I sent out 34 letters three days ago and I haven’t gotten a call yet.”

Here’s the thing… You won’t get any calls. At least not form 34 letters.

A good response rate from a “cold” mailing to potential clients is about 1%. If you mail 100 letters (good letters!), you may get one call. One. Then you’ve still got to “sell” them on the idea that you are the solution to their problem.

I had to email him back and explain that he needed to mail hundreds of letters and probably mail to the same law firms over and over again.

I used to send letters every thirty days or so to a law firms I wanted to work for!

Remember they may not need your services right when they get the letter! But six months or a year into the letter writing campaign they may need a (new?) process server. Then they call!

If you want a client in the first 30 days you need to mail 250 to 500 good letters, with a good offer to good potential clients! There’s still no guarantee, but I like you odds.

Note: Let’s look at the math of mailing 500 letters…

Mailing 500 letters cost about $250. (About 50 cents per letter. I know it cost a bit more than that for printing and envelops, but just for ease of the math let’s say about 50 cents a piece.)

If you get just one client who uses you to serve just 5 service pack (at $50 / pack) in the next 30 days… you’re even and you have that client for solid repeat work that pays off over and over again! These are reasonable numbers.

Watch the video for more details, but remember… Getting clients is the single hardest part of your job as a private investigator or process server! Period. Don’t get discouraged. Just use good business sense, keep your day job as long as you can, don’t go into debt and give great customer service once you get a client.

Let me know if you have a question you’d like me to answer in one of my weekly videos.

Committed to you success,
Larry Kaye, P.I.

P.S. – The day after I filmed this video I got an email from my “student” who had bought my course announcing he had just gotten his first serve! Congratulations! You can see a video with more about that on my post 1 Messed-Up Marking Idea That Actually Works!

P.S.S. – Don’t miss my special report titled… If You Want To be a Private Investigator Give Up… Unless You Do These Three Things. You can get it on the home page of my blog.