Alright KID,
quit thinking about it and get it done.
First focus on the closest 2000 addresses to your store, and just pound them with your menus, and DH’gers.
The closer the address, the faster you delivery times, and the less likely they are going to pass you to go to your competitor.
You don’t need to get anything special. I have found when opening a new store that I need to inform the public that (1) I am open, (2) My location, (3) My Hours (4) Major differences between me and the competition (5) My Menu & Prices.
I do this by printing a nice menu, and I door hang it, I direct mail it.
Go to www.melisadata.org and under free lookups you can do a closest carrier routes search to your address, most carrier routes are about 400 to 600 addresses. Then purchase those addresses, they cost about $9.99 per 1000. Get them Walk-Sequenced. Go to your local Post Office, and spend the $320. to get a bulk mail permit. Take the class on bulk mailing if they offer it, or sit down with your postmaster, and ask him how to do bulk mailings.
I print out 2000 menus a month, and mail out one carrier route a week. The cost is about 10 cents for my menu, 2 cents for address and label, and 12.7 cents for each address, when mailing “Saturation Letter” through your DDU, Designated Delivery Unit. At about 25 cent per piece it cost me about $125. a week, my response rate is about 7 to 10% within a month depending on the strength of the offer. I ussually put a two coupons on the menu, Buy One, Get One Free (carryout & dine-in only) and Buy One, Get One Half Off (Delivery).
This coupled with say 500~1000 Door hung menus a week should set your business on fire.
J-rok can do the math for you, I see him hammer this point in all the time.
500 to 1000 DH a week, 2% immediate response, probably upwards of 5% over the next month.
500 direct mail menu’s a week, 5% immediate response, upwards of 10% over the next month.
Create a four week cycle, and stick to it, and hammer the closest 2000 addys.
What will probably happen is you will see a $400 to $500 a week boost the first month, and it will wane a little the second month but you will still see a continous upward trend maybe you will see an increase of $300 from you previous benchmark.
And what that is, is in the first month you convinced 10% of the 2000 to try your product for the 1st time, there not happy with brand x, so they try you, for some reason you don’t completely wow 100% of them maybe you only win over 60% of them, but thats cool cause, next month you will probably win over a different 10% and you will have retained 6% from the month before, and so on.
Eventually you will plateau, it will seem that regardless of your continued efforts you aren’t growing any more, thats when you can increase you focus to the nearest 4000 customers, don’t stop marketing the original 2000 cause, at least 14% of the families will sell there house and move, this year, and you could capture the new customer that moves into a house that was buying from brand x.
