Direct Mail Advertising

Now that you have a clean and usable mailing list of all your current customers it is a fairly straightforward process to mail a piece of advertising material to them.

One approach that I’ve seen small business owners use is to:

Spend their time and creative juices to write an award winning, (but generic), letter, (and usually re-write, and re-write, and re-write, etc).  Lets call this 2 hours of labor, at maybe $50 per hour, this is $100 worth of the owners time and effort.

Print out 600 copies, (we just made up 600 clients for our illustration), on their pre-printed company letterhead.  At maybe $25 per 100 sheets plus printer time and ink lets call it $40 per 100 or $240 for the 600 letters.

Hand sign each letter.  Lets be generous and say 10 letters per minute.  That is another hour of the owners time.  $50.

Hand fold each letter.  Throw another hour at that task.  $50.

Hand insert each letter into their pre-printed company envelopes.  Printed envelopes at another $25 per 100 is another $150

Hand stamp each envelope.  Throw another hour at that.  $50.  Plus the 39 cent first class stamp or postage, is $234 in postage.  Total is $284.

And finally hand deliver the pile of advertising material to the local post office, (or mail drop box on the corner).  Done on the way home, free.

Total for this generic advertising letter, printed in black only is $874.  Or about $1.41 for each letter.

The response to the generic letter to actual customers might be as high as say 10 percent.  That is 60 responses, or a cost of $14.57 per response.

If you convert about 1/3 of the responses to actual sales, this would be 20 sales, at an advertising cost of $43.70 per sale.

Hope you are selling something that will pay for this and give you an actual positive return on your investment.

That is one way to do it.

Next we will explore some other methods that can be less costly per sale and a better return on your invested time and money.

At A Digital Printer we can show you how and prove it to your satisfaction.  http://www.ADigitalPrinter.com, Toll Free 877-930-5200