success with mailers

[eatmorepizzanc]

Hi. I am meeting with a sales rep from a company who does monthly mailers. We have never done this type of program before and would like to hear some feedback on the pros and cons and what I can expect to be budgeting for this type of marketing. It’s the type of mailer that is like a flyer with coupons. The big chains tend to do them. I’ve always considered them junk mail until now.

 

[lawman]

I just met with a rep from mspark http://www.mspark.com/products-services/direct-mail/shared-mail/wrap the other day and I’m considering this as well. I’m a new store and have been designing my own flyers/postcards, having them printed and delivered to me, then I sort and use EDDM with the good ole US Postal Service.

I too consider the mailers junk, but I seem to always pull out the coupons for Capt. D’s so I guess I use it. I also asked family, employees and customers if they pay attention to the mailers and overwhelmingly they said they do. The problem is that the the ‘big three’ pizza chains also use this so I’m not sure my message will not get lost. And I don’t like to associate myself with one of the couponing franchise chains. On the other hand, if they are in there and I’m not I might not get the customer anyway.

For me, the biggest pro is the amount of reach for relatively little dollars and effort. The biggest con is that a lot of people probably do consider this type of mailing junk and will discard. Also, the message will be bundled together with competitors. I’ll have to focus on why I’m better since I don’t compete on price with the big boys. Not sure if the ones who actually use the mailers are just value driven consumers looking for the best deal or not.

Assuming it works, the price for the shared mail is a lot cheaper than the EDDM. I wasn’t interested in the actual wrap (the outside pages that the inserts go into) as they covered more area than I needed. But the inserts were priced around $0.0488-$0.773 per piece depending on whether you delivered to an entire zip code, a split zip code (#####A, #####B, etc), or a local carrier route. You can mix and match zip codes, splits, and carrier routes to target just your customer area. The minimum for my area was 15,000 inserts.

The inserts range in size and shapes. The two I’m looking at are 10.5" x 11" and 5.5" x 11. They will design and print on both sides for the prices mentioned above. They give discounts for committing to a 3 month run and further discounts for a 12 month run.

So, to mail out a double-sided 10x11 inch flyer to 15,256 mailboxes would run $1064.25/month for a 12 month run or $1141 for a 3 month run. The 5.5x11 would be $679.11 and $859.36, respectively.

I plan on contacting http://www.valassis.com/ as well to compare costs. Either way, I think I’ll sign up for a three month period and see what happens.

 

[royster13]

You can not measure the cost of a program by how little you spend…You also need to compare your costs against how effective it is in reaching your target market…These shared mailers may be very cheap, however, if they do not generate a good return on investment the low price will not matter as you will have wasted your money…Or could have done much better by spending your money elsewhere…

As far as how much money you need to spend…This is a calculation that is a work in progress…It will depend on how aggressive or passive others in your market are, how many other stores there are, how your price point fits into the market, etc., etc…

Some stores spend next to nothing and others spend a “boatload”…You need to make adjustments until you have have maximized your “bottom line”…At the end of the day, this is the number that matters…

PS…Some of my clients have told me once you get into to these monthly mailers, it is hard to stop because the type of clients they attract are only loyal until the coupons stop…

 

[eatmorepizzanc]

$1,064 for 1 month or for 1 year? I am sorry, I could not stomach spending $1,000+ in one month to get what has been historically a 2% return on the coupon use. Gulp. Thanks for your great response though!

 

[royster13]

eatmorepizzanc:

$1,064 for 1 month or for 1 year? I am sorry, I could not stomach spending $1,000+ in one month to get what has been historically a 2% return on the coupon use. Gulp. Thanks for your great response though!

2% may or may not be a good number depending on how it plays out in the long run…If the 2% is all new customers for your POS data base, the initial acquisition cost may be worth it in the long run…If those customers repeat in the future they have a value far beyond the short term costs…

 

[BspaPizza]

The easiest way to get menus or other mailers out is using the EDDM tool on the USPS site. The mailer companies just charge you an extra charge that you could do yourself.