Waste

The $ I wasted on direct marketing (and the system I built because of it)

I have a folder on my desktop called “DO NOT REPEAT.” It’s full of emails I wrote, lists I built, people to avoid, and campaigns I launched with genuine conviction that this time, this one, was going to land. Agents were going to call. Producers were going to bookmark me. Work was going to materialize from the sheer force of my effort and a well-placed subject line.

Yeah well, you can guess how it went.

I’m not going to be precious about it because I wasted real money on direct marketing before I understood what I was actually doing. And not “oops I bought a bad little course” money. Real money. Time, too, which, if you’re a working voice actor, is the thing you have least of. But I trusted all the hype and didn’t fully understand the scope of what I was about to undertake. Because here’s the thing that people don’t talk about: I didn’t fail with those programs because I was “bad” at marketing. I failed because I was doing the “right thing” in completely the wrong way. There’s a difference. And once I figured out what that difference was, everything changed.

This is that story. Buckle up.

The first campaign I remember being genuinely proud of was a cold email sequence I sent to a list of about 300 people. THREE HUNDRED.

Like I said, I had done everything right. All the methods I had absorbed from these experts started to be put into practice. I researched the companies and the specific people. I personalized the subject lines. I wrote copy that wasn’t “Hi I’m Mandy and I do voiceover things please hire me.” I had my shit together! my audio, my resume, website. I even staggered the sends so it didn’t look spammy.

Open rate: decent. Responses: three. Bookings: zero. Ok. “It’s a numbers game”, I would say. So I built a bigger list. Sent again. Refined the subject lines. Tested different CTAs. Tracked everything in yet another fucking spreadsheet that I will never show another human being because of how many color-coded tabs are in it. Seriously it looks like it was built by a serial killer.

And to complete shock to NO ONE, I got the same result, at larger scale, with more of my time attached to it.

What I didn’t understand then… and what took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out… is that the list wasn’t the problem. The email wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had no system for my content and no thoughts for what happened after someone opened it. I was treating direct marketing like a vending machine. Put effort in, get bookings out. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

Direct marketing for voice actors isn’t a campaign. It’s a relationship architecture. And I was building billboards when I should have been building doors.

So here’s what I actually changed.