Old School Direct Marketing Still Works!

Thanks to my friend and client John Schmitt who gave me the heads up on the USPS new $.142 rate for carrier route mailing! If you have not heard, you need to pay attention. For most brick and mortar business owners, your core of business comes from a certain radius around your location. If you keep track of your customers and their locations it is easy to figure out. If your not doing something to keep track of your customers, you are missing out on the single most valuable tool for your business and most valuable asset should you ever want to sell your business.

So let’s assume you know that most of your customers come from a few miles away to give up some hard earned cash for what you offer. Then let’s assume that you want to increase the flow of that cash to your business. It is easier to sell an existing customer, but to mail to your customer list cost 44 cents each just for postage. With the Every Door Mailing program you can mail to everyone in the neighbor hood at a rate of only 14.2 cents each. It is likely that your customers neighbors are fairly similar to your customer, now let’s make them customers. The trick is to create an “Irresistible Offer” that will make the phone ring or door ding. You can mail a piece up to 12″ by 15″ that is 3/4″ thick! You have to provide enough of the same piece for all of the particular carrier route, with a minimum of 200 per route and maximum of 5,000. The piece has to be a minimum of 6.125″ tall to qualify. You can get real creative with this. Bulky mail works great – pens, screws, nails, coins and a great number of items can be used in the mail to get attention. This helps the number of responses, it is tough to get anyone’s attention these days. I’m surprised your still with me… but I’m getting to the good part.

Being of “frugal” mindedness. I’ve found the least expensive way to use this program and bring in some dollars. I print a 9″ tall by 6″ wide full color post card and send to targeted routes. The total cost of the mailing is only 28.2 cents each for postage and printing and $100 for design and delivery. Just yesterday I delivered 1,822 pieces to the Clio post office and 566 pieces to the Birch Run post office for iKen Video. We printed up 2,500 post cards so there are about 150 to send out yet but we hit the areas that we wanted to start with. The phone has started to ring today! The same day they hit the street we have strong signs of some good sales coming. With iKen’s offer it requires the clients to gather up their old VHS tapes and bring them in to his location, so that could take a few days. I’ll post an image of the post card here and keep you posted on the progress.

The next mailings will be for Huckleberry Junction Playhouse Theater with some special pizza and party offers and Staley’s Plumbing & Heating offers for new advanced water softeners that reduce Tannin for homeowners using wells near lakes. Let me know if you want to set up a mailing for your Irresistible Offer!

Read more about Direct Mail and review pricing by clicking here.