Alot of people ask what works best as far as marketing goes…Here is what works for us. We have not done any marketing for the last 3-4 months, we lost some key people and had to hire and train new ones.Finally last week we were ready to mail menu’s again, this is our main advertising and marketing plan. On Wednesday we dropped 3800 menu’s off at the post office and they went out Thursday. Between Thursday and Sunday we saw a sales increase of $2000. Our sales for the past 4 weeks have been pretty much the same so it was pretty easy to see the difference mailng made. Hope this helps someone else out there.
Thanks Hickory !
I have a couple of questions. Do you use Melissa data to find your addresses ? What was the cost on the mailing ?
I ask because we just started mailling menus ourselves. No where near the 3800 you did though. We did 200 last week and are doing 400 this week.
I’d like to do more, but right now we are printing, folding, stickering, addressing and stamping all the menus ourselves. Once we get a good system going we’ll be able to turn out more.
cost of mailing was $552. We ordered 15,000 menu’s from our printer( cost $1750). We get the 11 x 17 trifold glossy menu’s. We did get the permit from the post office, roughly $300 for that, plus $150 per year to kepp the permit. We get the menu’s from our printer already addressed and in boxes according to the carrier routes the post office uses. When we drop them off at the post office we pay 12.7 cents per menu to mail them.
sorry, trying to do 6 things at once, the price we pay to mail a menu has gone up to over 14 cents, used to be 12.7. Find out who does the bulk mailing at your local post office and make them a friend. We always give a gift certificate when we drop off our menu’s. Don’t know if it helps, but our menuu’s always go out the next day ( we typically drop them off after lunch).
We us the Chamber of Commerces bulk stamp. You paid 14 cents to mail a 11x17 menu. What’s the size of the menu when it’s folded and shipped. I paid 20 cents to mail a 8.5x3.75 menu and think that’s too much. When we had a mailing company mail Monster Magnets they were about the same size and we paid 16.6 cents each.
I know they do weight too, but there’s no way that our menus are heavier than those Monster Magnets.
folded it is 5x11
We do not use melissa data for our menu’s. We have our printer find all the addresses within 2.5 miles of our store and use those. We have approx. 15k addresses in that area or us so we order 15k at a time and mail them out over 3 months.