Beat or Meet Your Sales Forecasts by Year’s End, Part 3
One thing you can do to generate additional revenue between now and the end of the year is to make use of a postcard. We talked previously in this series about using postcards before and after a catalog drop to enhance your catalog’s offerings and increase revenue. We also talked about finding room in your mail schedule to drop an additional catalog.
Now, here’s another way to use a postcard.
Instead of an extra catalog, do a postcard mailing to select groups of customers. Determine what part of your customers and/or prospects would respond to a postcard. Consider mailing to older customers who haven’t ordered in a while. Or you could mail to prospects who came via your Web channel and haven’t ordered from your traditional catalog. Yet another idea to consider is mailing a postcard to recently acquired single buyers with an offer on their next order, with the goal being single to multibuyer conversion.
Postcards usually cost less than your catalog. And if its size is 4 inches by 6 inches or smaller, you can mail First Class for postage of around 25 cents per name. (Hint: You’re targeting a very specific in-home window.) I just did a postcard mailing this week, about 20,000 names, and it’s costing my client approximately 37 cents per unit in the mail.
Of course, don’t expect as high a response rate and/or average order size with a postcard as your regular catalog.
Another strategic approach: Target a specific product (like a new item, clearance item, etc.) to a certain segment of your customers. Or query your customer file, find groups of customers who bought a particular item and offer them a related cross-sell item.
That all said, be very careful to test these ideas properly and keep a close eye on your results. While these ideas have been used before, they may wind up cannibalizing results from other catalogs mailed around the time of your postcard mailings (either before or after). Test in small increments, and be careful to stay away from your core multibuyers until you know the effect such mailings will have on your P&Ls.
Jim Gilbert has had a storied career in direct and digital marketing resulting in a burning desire to tell stories that educate, inform, and inspire marketers to new heights of success.
After years of marketing consulting, Jim decided it was time to “put his money where his mouth was" and build his own e-commerce company, Premo Natural Products, with its flagship product, Premo Guard Bed Bug & Mite Sprays. Premo in its second year is poised to eclipse 100 percent growth.
Jim has been writing for Target Marketing Group since 2006, first on the pages of Catalog Success Magazine, then as the first blogger for its online division. Jim continues to write for Total Retail.
Along the way, Jim has led the Florida Direct Marketing Association as their Marketing Chair and then three-term President, been an Adjunct Professor of Direct and Digital marketing for Miami International University, and created a lecture series, “The 9 Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing,” which he has presented across the country at conferences and universities.
