Here’s another quick story from the early days of my career at the investment management company. This was a while ago, when email didn’t really exist. (Dating myself here, I realize.) We sent a lot of mail.
Each piece was individually hand-stamped. That’s right, stamps licked and put on each envelope by hand. And not with a single, going-rate postage stamp either. With vintage smaller denomination postage stamps the company purchased through a network of collectors.
There was another catch too; the President of the company liked the mail to have ‘themes,’ and insisted that each person was responsible for stamping his or her own mail. An office full of well-trained, educated, relatively well-paid employees trying to find some commonality that could be considered a theme from a box full of postage stamps.
Famous political leaders. The Wild West. Animals.
Sounds a little crazy, and it was. And yet… it worked. It set the company apart, and, though I don’t have the statistics to prove it, probably ensured that a lot more of our mail was opened than otherwise would have been.
The real key: people remembered us when we called. Some even asked for more mail!
Be different. Stand out. You have to get noticed to succeed.
