Old School Direct Mail 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.

Let’s repeat that clearer…. Your client list is GOLD!

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.

Successful Mailing Looks Like This:

In July 2011 we 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 the very next day! 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. Within three weeks iKen’s income from the mailing was triple the cost of the mailing, making a tidy profit. More sales continue to come in and many of the new clients are referring other clients. Which raises his ROI even further!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If it works, do it again!

A second mailing was sent in a larger format along with an offer from Huckleberry Junction. Just one client generated double the  cost of the mailing in sales revenue! Another successful mailing. Notice on this mailing we added a Deadline and Free offer which increased response.

Huckleberry reported that the first day after the mailing they received double the cost of their mailing in food sales directly from the flyer!

The next mailer was 8.5″ x 11″ full color, 100lb paper stock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Want to create your own success story?

Thanks to the Every Door Direct Mail program by the US Post Office, you can make it happen!

Here is how it works:

We will print a two sided Full Color 8.5” x 11” 100lb Stock Paper with Glossy Finish

Provide your own design or we will hire Blazing Graphics to work their magic for you: Design Fee: $150

You have total control over where they are mailed:

You visit: http://eddm.usps.com to decide on the areas to send the mail. Enter a location and select options for Business, Residential, PO Boxes and the radius of the mailing. Display on a map and you can mouse over the routes to select which neighborhoods to mail to.

We have to mail to complete routes, no more than five to a post office per day, and no routes under 250 pieces… USPS rules.

What we need is the Zip Code, Carrier Route and Count (number of addresses)

Decide on the quantity you want to send then use the USPS site to select your routes that tally as close to the print total as possible. The extras will be provided to you for your use to hand out.

We do the heavy lifting to get the great postage rate!

We will organize the mailing to the USPS specs and deliver to the post office for that carrier route based on your selections. Each post office delivery is $25 for Genesee County, $50 for Saginaw, Detroit, Lansing areas, $75 for Jackson, Battle Creek, Grand Rapids areas in Michigan. Call for quotes out of these areas.

Below are the combined cost for printing, postage and organizing the mailing.
Qty Cost Avg.
2,500 $1,200 $0.48
5,000 $1,725 0.345
10,000 $2,775 0.2775
15,000 $3,774 0.2516
20,000 $4,864 0.2432

To get your program started right away, contact me with the form below: