Put in an order for 500 postcards that I designed today. Going to try out some Direct mail advertising. The plan is to use the USPS Every Door Direct Mail system to send about 250 out to residential addresses along a postal route through the Uptown area of Houston. I was originally planning on buying a mailing list with a targeted clientele, but shipping them was just going to be too expensive at 24 cents per, plus ~$40 to buy the mailing list. With the every door direct mail I can only pick the postal route, but the price drops to 14 cents per piece. The other half of the cards I'm going to hand deliver around my area. Here's to hoping for at least a 0.4% response rate, which is my break even point. Anyone else tried this out before? How were your results?
let me know how this goes man. I have really been considering this lately as most of the nicer places out here are gated so there really is no way in unless you are a mail carrier of some sort or other service related people. How did you go about getting this all setup? Perhaps you could PM me or even post it up here. I use to hand do flyers when i first started out, now i use business cards and the response isn't horrible.
Well as for buying the postcards I bought them from Vistaprint, which is hands down the cheapest option for printing although they don't necessarily have the fastest turn around. As for my original plan, I was going to use DirectMail.com to buy a mailing list, then print them out on adhesive labels and mail them myself. But then I started reading about the EDDM service from the USPS. There website is here: https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/ And is kinda confusing, but not too hard to use. You sign up for a business account, then add the EDDM service to your account as the set-up. Then I used their location search to find postal routes in the area I wanted and with the right number of homes for me. The map search shows you exactly where that postal truck will go and exactly how many residential homes are along that route. They have a minimum of 200 deliveries and a maximum of 5000. Then you just purchase that route, take that to your post office along with the postcards to be mailed and they'll hook you up from there.
We do a mail campaign through the office I work at that gets sent out monthly. I'm sure our process is slightly different, but we have the ability to target certain areas with homes of certain size and household income. If you could find a company that could do something like that it might be more expensive on the front end but the ability to target homes who have the income to spend on detailing one of their many cars might be a better long term investment. Being able to pick a certain route though sounds like the best bang for your buck seeing as you can probably pick a route more well known for it's above average income houses. Good luck either way!
Yeah I had the option picking and choosing based on different demographics profiles, but that was going to cost me around 8 cents per piece, plus I would have to spend 24 cents a piece to mail it instead of 14 cents. I know for a fact nearly every residence on the route I picked is 2500+ sq ft, 2-4 car garage, and worth atleast $300k+. Hoping to be decent bang for buck. If this doesn't work out, I might try a targeted mailer down the road.
Keep us posted. I looked at the usps site a few months back and it was super confusing at the time. What did you end up spending and for how many pieces? Can you pm a link to your flyer? Would be cool to see how others do their stuff.
im stoked. For a couple hundred bucks i can target the clients that i've been trying to figure out how to get too LoL. All the ones in the gated communities. I'm going to slowly look at putting something together myself in the next couple of months. Thanks
I did mine entirely through VistaPrint and used their template. Quick, easy and from start to end it cost me less than an hour. I only got 1 phone call from it and it was 2 months later. Luckily I got at least one and she booked enough to "break even". I just sent out my second batch as I changed my website domain to make it easier for people to remember. A 1% return would make my day, a 0.5% return would still make money. .33% is all I need to "break even" again. It sucks to throw that money out there, but San Diego is too big for me to cover and I have too much competition to be walking around handing out flyers.
This is a good idea. I was at the post office last month and saw an ad for this service. Probably will look into it next year, as the end of this.season is drawing near.
Makes me wonder if California is becoming over saturated. I thought there would be tons of cars for everyone out there.
Wish I could tell y'all some results I've had, but I fractured my collar bone the day I got the post cards in the mail from Vista Print. The injury has made it almost impossible to hold a buffer or any other tools in my right arm, so I decided to wait a few weeks to let it heal up before sending them out. But fear not, I should be sending them out within 2 weeks or so!
