Ask Joy Gendusa

Interview with Jim Logan, AllBusiness.com’s marketing advisor.

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Hi Kimberly,

Your postcard looks great! It has everything it needs. Now repeat mailings are a must and you also need to sell packages or up-sell so that you get your return of investment…. $25 per order is not a large enough invoice to warrant the expense of the postage BUT with a good followup system and other more pricey services to sell this will be an amazing lead generator.

I want the shots!!

Sincerely,

Joy

“We had a 1.8% response rate and made $55,000 off the cards we mailed and 270 came in from sales clerks passing out to help close sales. These passed-out cards accounted for $110,000 in sales!”

- Freeman Jewelers

“I was busy before but now I’m swamped! I must have done like 50 estimates from the first round and still getting calls. I’ve easily made over $30,000 on the first round!“

- Canto Construction

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Dear Joy,

Thank you for your e mail and your story.

I am a tax preparer and mortgage loan officer.  I work closely with a real estate agent who is my best  friend.

What could you recommend as far as us doing a joint mailing campaign?  He would get the sale end and I would do the mortgage loan.

I also know that I want to build my tax practice but it is July and no one is really thinking about their taxes.  When would you recommend I start a mailer for this ?

Thanks,

Pat

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Dear Pat,

Thank you for your e-mail and I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. I just got back in town.

During tax off season it’s a great time to promote your Bookkeeping/QuickBooks services to obtain new customers. Also it’s a great idea to go in with your real estate friend on a promotion because you would both benefit from it. We have many successful campaigns running in the Mortgage/Real estate industry right now and your Marketing Consultant, Ashlie Juric,  is able to discuss this with you further and determine what would work best for you. I’ve cc’ed her on this e-mail so you will hear from her soon.

Let me know how it goes!

Sincerely,

Joy

Interview with Keith Rosen, AllBusiness.com’s Sales Advisor

Joy

I have a medical spa.  I have a database of 2500 emails and market to them weekly (having a mailing data base of 5500)  Most current customers are on the 2500 list.  I went  back and started inputting emails about 7 months ago along with birthdays so could market a birthday card to them.

I receive all these groupon things that go out to about 20,000 in my area,  Yes, they are people that may have opted into groupon in some way BUT GROUPON HAD to get a list somewhere to start….

My question is then, if you/I purchase a list to email to with income level requirements (or not), can’t we get a good list.

Another area I need to increase traffic in is Neograft hair transplants.  I am only one within 800 miles that does this …

So…how do lists do comparative to groupon lists and can we get a good list?

Thanks,

Kathleen

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Dear Kathleen,

To answer your question, I don’t know of any way to buy an e-mail list as people need to give their approval to be on such a list. And I don’t know how groupon started and how they got their very first e-mail addresses. Plus, people do not like to receive emails from businesses they don’t know. Period. Sure, maybe you will get one or two new customers. Maybe that doesn’t apply to all businesses 100% but I can say it applies to 99% easily… every time I speak publicly I survey the audience and ask “how many of you like receiving emails from businesses you don’t know?” NOBODY ever raises their hand. What occurs in the mind of the recipient of that email is an immediate lowering of affinity for that business. What you are trying to do with marketing is RAISE the affinity so that folks want to do business with you – not avoid you and think badly of you.

The way we get people’s contact information is by buying a mailing list of the right target market and mailing postcards to them over and over again. Then when they call in, go to a website or a landing page we get their contact information and add them to our e-mail list. The best way to get this accomplished is to offer them something free or a discount on the postcard but in order for them to get it they have to go to a landing page and fill out their contact information.

What marketing do you do besides your weekly e-mails?

Sincerely,

Joy

Day three was Manhattan day, good bye rental car, hello New York taxis!

In the middle of Times Square, up high in the MTV building, we found Zach, the CEO and Founder of the Film, Stage and Showbiz Expo (www.showbizexpo.com). Zach has an incredible story. He started his business a couple years ago and uses postcards to target businesses who should exhibit at his show. He’s had amazing success and now puts on four tradeshows a year with thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors. The most impressive part is how young he is! He knows he needs to market and attributes a lot of his success to his consistent marketing. We had a blast with Zach and enjoyed shooting with Times Square in the background!

Next stop was an upscale mens’ clothing store at 347 West Broadway. Steve Krampf is the owner of Beau Brummel which offers gorgeous imported clothing, and made-to-measure suits, sport jackets and shirts. I couldn’t resist and had to purchase a few items for my husband!

We had an amazing time in New York. It was refreshing to meet entrepreneurs who are succeeding right now, despite the doom and gloom of the economy. The moral of the story was definitely, the more you promote, the more successful your business will be. We witnessed 9 perfect examples of this in New York and New Jersey!

Now that you have begun your email marketing campaign, you should take a look at the importance of building your email list. It’s definitely ok to start with a smaller list, but you must make the effort to grow your list. continue reading…

Day two we hit the road to visit some of our New Jersey clients.

First stop was Home Health Mates (www.homehealthmates.com), a franchise that offers in-home and nursing home care. Their franchisees use PostcardMania to promote in their areas and Jonathan likes working with us because we handle all of their design work so that he doesn’t have to hire an ad agency. It’s always fun for me to meet another entrepreneur and hear their story of success. Thanks Jonathan for having us!

Next stop (after a quick pit stop at the local Starbucks) was Sharp Business Services (www.sharpbz.com). They offer bookkeeping for local businesses. I loved hearing their story. Rich sold his company a few years back and went into business with his wife who was a bookkeeper. He handles the marketing for her and with the help of PostcardMania has grown their client base exponentially.

With Rich’s first postcard order he provided his own design and wasn’t happy with the response he received. His account rep, Victoria convinced him to give it another try using a design that we came up with for him. He took Victoria’s advice and got an incredible response! He has been mailing the same card ever since and is thrilled with the results. Victoria was so good to him, she even let him use her own picture on his postcard! This is the design she came up with for him.

Final New Jersey stop was another Passport Health location (www.passporthealthnj.com), this time to visit Ken Bear, CEO of the New Jersey location. It was great to see Ken again and hear how his business is doing. What a great concept they have here, kudos for all of their success!

Then back to the city…Time for margaritas and Mexican at one of my favorite Manhattan restaurants!

Joy,

I am in the Real Estate Investment world now, but came from the dot com – tech markets as National Sales Manager for leading companies and start-up’s…

If postcards really work, why is your marketing focused on using e-mail and web/video to attract new clients like me?

More information on how to integrate the two effectively would be great!  I like direct target marketing….but want to find a way to pull them to my web site & newsletter!

John

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Dear John,

Thanks for your e-mail. Here is some “insight” about PostcardMania.

We mail over 120,000 postcards every single week to our customer and prospect lists. I started with mailing out 1000 postcards a week when I started my company and then I hit a plateau. And do you want to know what saved and expanded my business? Postcards! I doubled the amount of postcards I was sending out and a few weeks later I doubled my revenue. I kept increasing the amount I was mailing out and this has been the key to my success. Apart from that one has to use other marketing tools such as a website, e-mail marketing etc…

And the way to pull people to your website, apart from paying “pay per click” on google (which is very expensive), is by mailing postcards over and over to the right target market. It’s a very inexpensive way to get someone’s attention and drive them to a landing page or website or have them call you. Then you can capture their information like e-mail address, phone number, etc… and keep warming them up, giving them tips in e-newsletters until they are ready to buy from you. This is how you can combine both and this is what we do.

We do offer web design and e-mail marketing but postcards are still the main product of PostcardMania.

Sincerely,

Joy