Show Me Postcards

According to BizReport 2010, up to 85% of a store’s customers come from within a 5-mile radius of that business.

In other words – your best customers may be right down the street, around the corner, or a couple of blocks away.

How do you reach THOSE prospects?

Making sure your message gets in the front of the right people – no more but no less – is an important goal for an effective and affordable marketing campaign. Frankly, a lot of advertising options wind up being expensive “overkill.”

It can be difficult to target something as small or as specific as “I want to reach the households within a 1 mile radius of The Village of Cherry Hill.”

One way to do that is with direct mail.

I did a search for households around The Village of Cherry Hill here in Columbia MO, and selected postal carrier routes that add up to about 5,000 homes.  Those selections are reflected in the image.

It would be easy to reach those households with regular postcard mailings.  For those businesses in The Village of Cherry Hill who target consumers directly (such as the chiropractors, fitness centers, optometrists, dentists, insurance agents and financial planners), this could be an extremely effective way to contact people who are predisposed to shop with companies that are convenient to their location.

An EDDM campaign would make postage extremely affordable; this relatively new USPS program allows firms to touch customers by neighborhood or zip code radius without names or addresses.  Those businesses could even do a shared postcard mailing to minimize expenses even further.

You can also take the concept of reaching certain neighborhoods a step further by concentrating on those parts of town where you do not have a presence, but want one.  Since neighborhoods tend to have shared characteristics and demographics (such as homes of the same age and in the same condition) you might want to target older neighborhoods if you own a roofing company, or newer middle-income subdivisions if you want to reach families with children.

I’d love to discuss the idea of a hyper-local, geo-targeted marketing campaign with you, and don’t want the hassle of printing and mailing, contact me today!

Postcard marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing media available, especially when you consider how well they excel at one main task:  ATTRACTING ATTENTION.

So how much do they cost?

The major costs for direct mail postcards are:

• Printing
• Postage
• Graphic design and Copywriting costs
• Renting a mailing list
• Mail preparation (fulfillment)

As a general rule of thumb, most direct mail postcards fall in the range of 50 cents to $1 each.

Several factors influence the price you pay for postcards:

• the more you print at one time, the cheaper it is per card;
• larger postcards cost more;
• fancier postcards (full-color, printed both sides, perforation, etc.) cost more;
• the number you mail influences the price; volume/bulk mailings cost less postage per piece;
• the scarcity/complexity of the mailing list; an easy-to-find list of “residents” will cost less per name than a list of businesses with 50 or more employees in a certain zip code with a certain annual sales volume.

If you’re looking for customers in Columbia, MO, consider posting your offer on the gigantic Show Me Dynamite Deals postcard.  At around 4 to 6 CENTS PER HOUSEHOLD on special – that’s a savings of up to 96% on typical postcard mailings.

Why not give it a try?

I know, it’s hard to believe that direct mail still works – so for those of you who don’t believe something until you see hard data, check this out.

Statistics show that sales driven by direct mail marketing rose from $457 billion in 2010 to $477 billion in 201.

More convincing direct mail findings from the DMA’s Direct Marketing Statistical Fact Book 2011:

• 52.4% of U.S. consumers say they read direct mail received from retailers.*
• 53% say  they find direct mail “useful.”*
   
• 16.8%  have responded to retail mail offers.*
• Sales driven by non-catalog direct mail marketing rose from $457 billion in 2010 to $477 billion in 2011.*

*Source:  US Postal Service, Direct Magazine, August 2011, p. 4.  

What are you doing to grow your business?  If you’ve never tried postcard marketing – or you have, and it didn’t work as you’d hoped – contact me for an idea-generation session.