Where do / would you allocate your marketing budget?

[UncleNicksPizza]

I tried this for a little while, but the problem I came up with for our location was the issues of

• multiple customers for the same address
• wrong / incorrect spelling for customer accounts

How do you address these with your POS? Do you use generic greetings on your mailing label? Do you sometimes send multiple postcards to the same address if multiple people ordered? I am sure we could make the changes with our order takers, just not sure how much more time it would take to gather that correct data.

Dan

I use Revention, and it automatically merges accounts with the same address. In addition I use their mapping system so street names and zip codes are always correct (some times a name may be slightly misspelled but a lot of the names pull from the caller id)

 

[noreason]

Is everyone mailing via the postal service or through a third party like taradel? If third party, who are you using and why? I want to start mailing soon because it’s something we haven’t done in a very long time.

 

[bodegahwy]

We still do some direct mail. Generally we hit every address either once or twice in a year. We tend to do it in our “off-season” to drive some sales. In our market with so few routes it is cheaper to just do saturation mailings to every address in each of the 3 zip codes. Yes, some pieces go out of our delivery area but the EDDM routes here are bizarre and would have the same problem.

A much larger focus for us has been email campaigns. They are FREE to send out so we send 2-3 per month. Much of our marketing seeks to drive customers to our online order system where we capture the email address. Our regular direct mail also seeks to convert customers to online ordering by offering one really great offer that is only valid online.

Yes, we still do yellow pages. In dollar terms we are doing 20% of what we did five years ago but the book is still in every hotel and condo and delivered to all homes and businesses so it is well worth having an ad under “pizza”. I see no sense in not being in a resource a customer might use either to identify a place to buy or to find the phone number for one they heard of in some other way.

 

[UncleNicksPizza]

Bodega,

I am assuming saturation mailings are entire one time zip code drops, as opposed to single route drops, at a cheaper rate? Can you give me an information on this, as it may be better for me to go that route.

 

[RobT]

Eddm is your best bang for your buck in my opinion.
I did it from the beginning and the results are great.
I began to get lazy and really got turned off by my local post office. Always a line, waiting sometimes 30 minutes to get in and out of there.

Signed up with mail shark earlier this year and results are great with them. Getting a lot of compliments on the magnet mailers. Consistent marketing is a must to get results.

 

[Piper]

Bodega,

I am assuming saturation mailings are entire one time zip code drops, as opposed to single route drops, at a cheaper rate? Can you give me an information on this, as it may be better for me to go that route.

There is no additional discount for sending to an entire ZIP code versus a single carrier route, whether you use EDDM or Standard Mail. A saturation to a full carrier route is the cheapest possible per-piece price you can get, regardless of whether you send to an entire ZIP code or not. Basically, the post office definition of “saturation” is sending to an entire carrier route (or technically 90% of it).

EDDM routes are the same as carrier routes. EDDM is very attractive if your ZIP codes are comprised of city routes as opposed to rural routes.

Sending a saturation mailer to a “city” route is more complex than sending them to a “rural” route. EDDM essentially lets you mail to a city route in the same manner that you send to a rural route (i.e. simplified addressing). If you want to mail a saturation piece to a city route, they must be fully addressed and be sorted in the order that the carrier walks the route (called walk-sequence). That’s why those are called ECRWSS… Enhanced Carrier Route Walk Sequence Saturation. This is where EDDM is very handy, because it costs more money to 1) buy the list and 2) ensure the pieces remain sorted in the proper order.

Half of my delivery zone is comprised of city routes, and I use EDDM for those. The other half is rural routes and I use my bulk mail permit to mail there, because it doesn’t have the size restrictions of EDDM.

 

[bodegahwy]

Full zip code saturation mailings are cheaper for us than EDDM. We went through the full on line menu and calculated the actual costs with our printer. We would be using them for the mailing services in any case. I do not have the time to count and sort all the pieces and deliver to the post offices etc. The EDDM odd size restrictions are manageable. Postage is not the same but it is very close, too close to quibble about. The differences are in mailing set-up costs. In the end, it saves me a small amount of money to just to the full zip code mailings. The difference in total costs for 11,000 pieces (every address in our area) was about $200. I think it would be a very different picture in a city location where a full zip code would include many addresses outside the delivery area of a typical shop.

 

[mattbau43]

If you have local hotels/motels I believe that there is no better way to spend your money then to take care of the staff at the front desk. Feed them for free if you have to. Do whatever it takes for your place to be their favorite!

 

[314]

@Dale a question: How many pieces is a typical mailing for you when you are doing them 32 weeks a year? How often is each address getting a mailing in a year?

My bigger volume stores are around 2500-3500 pieces each drop depending on Carrier Route sizes - 5 - 7 routes. My lower volume shop is 1500-2000 2-4 routes.