Serendipity or Fate
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
This may be the cheesiest quote from Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. But when I read this long time ago, it really was profound and an inspirational quote. Something similar to that happened to me in the last three days.
Last week, I was reading a book about copywriting and marketing called "The Boron Letters". It is a series of letters written by some copywriting expert, Gary Halbert, to his son. In one chapter, he says about direct mail marketing. How to segment the list based on zip code, spend and many other factors. He says segmenting and customizing the direct mails sent that as a master trick. I was laughing about this to my colleague, telling these are things, digital marketers, using email automation tools take it for granted. Sending an email literally costs nothing compared to a direct mail.
Two days ago, I came across an interesting Berlin-based company called Optilyz. Some digging led me to understand that this company does "marketing automation" for direct mails. Yes, you read it right. They are bringing the intelligence of modern marketing automation for direct mails. They claim that direct mails have the highest conversion rate despite its cost and it is a $300B industry ripe for innovation. It took a lot of time for me to digest this. Think about it, when the entire industry is going in one direction and someone is taking an opposite and contrarian way, they may be genius or they may be stupid. I hope they are a genius.
The third one is like the voodoo shit. Today I got a marketing email from some random company that I was following a year back. The mail was about an ebook titled, "How Modern Data improves direct mail". I was like, what the hell is happening around me. The world is whispering me to notice about direct mail based marketing.
I don't know if this is a narrative fallacy that I am constructing based on three random events. Or is it simply that I am starting to notice and becoming aware of things that are already prominent in the world.
