Pakula's Pizza:
It’s very encouraging to hear that nobody has really flopped. We are more on the gourmet end and dont discount often. Of course you need to track these people some how, is there any other way? has anyone been succesful w just a menu No Coupons?
Has anyone done this themselves through the post office?
In five years of doing direct mail I have had exactly one drop flop out of hundreds. I decided to get fancy with a new item, a new offer and a higher price point. I seriously paid the price for that one at the end of November, because I lost money on the drop and lost about three weeks of advertising. I couldn’t drop the rest of them (15,000) knowing they would lose money and they’re still sitting in my garage. When you find something that works (which I had!) don’t change it! I got greedy thinking I’d get an extra $2.00 profit out of every order and got 1/3 the return as normal.
I’m the same way as you - fairly gourmet and we don’t straight discount from the menu price. All of our offers are package deals geared toward families (my main demographic.) All are designed to have several upsell possibilities. A package at $19.99 will usually yield an average ticket of around $26.50.
I do them myself at the post office for half of my area because they are rural routes. The other half of my area are city routes and I have a mailing house handle that. It’s possible to do city routes yourself, but it’s much more time consuming and worth the 1.8 cents I pay the mail house. I posted a thread a while ago with all of the logistics of mailing for yourself.
It may just me being an analysis junkie, but I would never drop without an offer I could track. I need to know something is working or not.
Thanks for posting this thread… It has made me realize that I haven’t mailed menus in almost 19 months - I’ve been sending all postcards. I think it’s time for me to starting sending menus again, especially since we’ve had so many people move due to the housing crisis in the past 2 years.
If you have your artwork ready, I’d like to suggest using
http://www.gotprint.com for your printing needs. They’re much cheaper than the other players I’ve seen and have a pretty quick turn around. Full color 8 1/2" X 11" menus (with bleed) come in at 5.9 cents each with shipping for 5,000.
Edited to add: My direct mail is also “general”, e.g. saturation. I mailed to my database for 5 years but stopped last summer. It’s much more expensive when it’s not saturation mail, 80% of my database resides in my delivery zone (so they’re getting the saturation mail anyway) and I’ve discovered the joys of e-mail marketing for my current customers. There was just no reason to blow $1,000 per month sending to my database anymore.