April 15, 2005
To name or not to name
We have an ongoing debate here in the office about personalising mail we send out to prospect businesses.
* Some people say we have to have a name contact for the business.
* Others argue that having the business is enough.
The right answer? I have no idea! (You'd expect that answer now I'd imagine)
Taking a look at the results of our mail out campaign shows that sending material to:
Acme Accounting
1 Smith St
Smithsville
works okay.
What works better is if the material is addressed to:
Joe Smith
Acme Accounting
1 Smith St
Smithsville
But then you have to weigh up the cost of developing a database with names and job titles. It is far easier to develop a database of just business names (i.e look in the Yellow Pages). Which means that we can send far more non-personalised material than personalised.
Taking all of that into account I'd say that (and I don't have the exact numbers to back this up) it's better to personally address the material. Your conversion rate (whether that be in leads or sales) is much better.
Regards
Brendon
Posted by Brendon at 2:26 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2005
Testing will save and/or make you money
Over the next couple of months we'll be implementing a UDS (Unaddressed Delivery Service) campaign - which is just a fancy term for saying we'll be having our promotional literature place in business PO Boxes within our target areas.
Here's the plan:
Day 1: DL promotional card with handwritten message delivered to the PO Box
Day 12: Same DL card delivered to PO with a different handwritten message
Day 30: Same DL card delivered to PO Box with different message
The DL cards cost us about 25 cents a piece.
In our initial assessment we had to review which area we would have our cards delivered to. We narrowed it down to 2 places:
1. Broadbeach - close to us and contains much of the market we target
2. Gold Coast Mail Centre - close to Broadbeach with a very similar market
Broadbeach has 471 PO Boxes, the Gold Coast Mail Centre has 1,478 Boxes.
Which one should we pick for the biggest impact? No idea!
So this is what I did.
I pulled out my calculator and figured out the cards alone would cost me $1,108.50 if I sent them to the Gold Coast Mail Centre. The cost for Broadbeach was $353.25.
The cost per delivery is 11 cents. That's $487.74 for the Mail Centre and $155.43 for Broadbeach.
By looking at the numbers we can see that sending the cards to the Gold Coast Mail Centre would cost $1,000 more than if I sent them to Broadbeach.
Getting back to "Which one should we pick for the biggest impact? - I still have no idea.
And because I have no idea I'll be smart (as smart as I can be!) and do a simple test.
1. I'll run the campaign through Broadbeach PO Boxes.
2. I'll measure the results.
3. If it is profitable I'll run the same campaign into the large Gold Coast Mail Centre PO Boxes.
Because then I'd have some decent data to justify and back up the decsion to spend $1,500 on a marketing strategy.
Testing what you do when you market can save you money and heartache.
Measuring the results of any campaign is a gimme. Measuring provides the information you need to make a well-informed and logical decsion on all of your marketing strategies.
Good luck!
Regards
Brendon
Posted by Brendon at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2005
Things that make you go "Mmmmmmmmmm"
We ran a display ad in the closest big city newspaper on the weekend. Click here for the ad (it's a pdf file).
Three- (3) things we considered when we ran our ad:
* A professional services firm needs to generate leads
* A firm like ours doesn't generate leads via advertising
* We do generate leads from our web site
Having said all that, we always try different things so we tried advertising to generate visitors to our web site which would, in turn, generate leads for our business.
It worked well (which surprised me a bit. I actually think the ad is way too cvheesy.). We have meetings all this week and next with potential clients interested in marketing and web work.
Who saw our ad - we advertised in the business section of the newspaper. Obviously those more likely to be interested in business will read the business section.
We did a few things differently with this ad. We didn't give a great call to action. We didn't provide an incentive. We didn't talk about benefits.
But what we did do was generate the type of people we want as clients to our web site (from where they contacted us). And getting business is what you want your advertising to do.
Regards
Brendon
(taken from www.tailored.com.au August 2003)
Posted by Brendon at 6:07 PM | Comments (0)
Top 10 ways to get more business - do these each and every day!
1. Call 2 old clients to say hello
2. Send out a newsletter detailing some offers you have
3. Post out 10 postcards to prospects
4. Send out a media release a day
5. Write an article for an industry magazine within your speciality
6. Send 3 clients an email offer of some sort
7. Send an offer with every invoice you send
8. Send a prospect something of interest (such as a press clipping)
9. Write to 1 industry organisation and offer a speech on your speciality
10. Read 1 web site like this one every day for fresh ideas
Business is about developing relationships. If you keep in contact with your clients they will continue to buy from you. If you get in contact with people who haven't heard of you before, then they might buy from you.
Good luck.
Brendon
(from www.tailored.com.au August 2003)
Posted by Brendon at 6:05 PM | Comments (0)