Steve,

I am in the process of having your marketing materials modified by the source that did yours , with my own contact info. Here’s where I have hit my stumbling block. I’ve never done a direct mailing, I didn’t know if you had any idea of what is the best way of selecting your target addresses to mail to? Income? Property value? I’m trying to figure out what’d be best. I was looking to mail to each potential client 6 times a year minimum so at least every other month. I know massive action is the best way to go, so I’d like to try and get out at least 50,000 postcards or more if I can afford it.

Luke

My Reply:

Hi Luke,

Good morning. Barbara is a great person to pick for doing design and edits, so she’ll treat you good and make sure you’re happy with everything she’s done.

The first thing that I would recommend that you do is go back into chapter 7 again and reread the method of mailing that I did.  Because I didn’t do any specific mailings to homeowners based on income, property value, or any other criteria.  I kept it real simple by doing "carrier route" mailings.  When you mail to a carrier route, you’re mailing to each home in the route.  So the postcard would be addressed to "Postal Patron", not to the individual homeowner.

The key is to do some initial research by driving into various subdivisions and deciding whether they are your ideal prospects. But it’s really easy to decide that though.  As soon as you enter the subdivision, you should have a pretty good idea whether it’s your target market or not.  Then using either a local direct mail house or dick tudor (the person who did all my mailings…info. in manual), you give the mail house a street number, street name, and zip.  From there they can determine what route number the home is in.  So that particular home and all the surrounding homes in the route will receive a postcard.

I had the advantage of being able to walk into dick’s business and see an actual map on the wall of all of the carrier routes in my area.  So I could see for example that "haile plantation" was in route 67.  So I would instruct Dick to mail postcards to route 67 since I knew haile plantation consisted of homes that were in my ideal target market.

Once you’ve done your initial research and you pretty much know what routes are good routes, then it’s just a matter of routinely mailing to those routes.  A couple words of advice though: First, try and mix into your mailings some flyer distributions.  In addition to all the postcard mailings I did, I also distributed flyers every single saturday to various routes.  So the homes were getting hit from all angles.  Pay a couple of kids to do this for you and they’ll be able to pump ‘em out quickly. 

And the second bit of advice would be to not make the mistake of pumping out 50,000 postcards to 50,000 different homes.  You need to take advantage of the repetition factor, so it’s important to space those postcards out and hit homes repeatedly. 

You do mention about "if I can afford it", but the thing to do is to mail to just two to 3 routes at first.  This might be maybe 1500 to 2000 postcards initially (depending on how many homes are in each route).  You’ll get calls from this mailing which will turn into jobs which will provide you the dollars to reinvest. 

Now keep in mind that the first mailing gives you the lowest response.  So those 2 to 3 routes need to be mailed to again about 3 weeks later.  See how this works? So I wouldn’t look at it as 50,000 postcards at once.  I would buy 5000 postcards at a time, mail to a few routes, reinvest some profits back into buying another 5000, and then continue on. 

As a side note, a window cleaner recently mentioned a great printing source to me.  They offer a quality postcard (14pt thickness and UV coating), but their pricing is the best I’ve seen.  It’s http://www.gotprint.com  I was about to say it’s $105 for 5000 postcards.  That’s what it was the last time I checked.  But I just checked today and they have the pricing listed at $99.55 for 5000 postcards, color front/black back.  Unbelievable pricing. There’s not really any price break by buying more cards like 10,000, so I’d simply buy 5000 postcards at a time. 

If you have any questions on this, let me know.  It may even be better with a phone call. 256-546-2446.  But check out Chapter 7 again first though.  The next step is just deciding who to use for the mailing process.  You certainly don’t want to have to buy postal permits and do all this mailing stuff yourself.  So look for a local direct mail house to work with or contact Dick.  Again, his info. is in the manual. Take care and have a great day.

Regards,

Steve

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