Postcard Case Studies

Knowledge comes from a wide array of sectors: books, magazines, seminars, classrooms and The School of Hard Knocks.

We learn from others, from ourselves, from mentors, from coaches, from colleagues and competitors; if we are receptive to knowledge, they all become our teachers.

In this chapter, I have highlighted case studies of a few of our clients. PostcardMania has created direct mail marketing campaigns for over 102,000 clients in over 350 different industries. If you don’t see your industry in this chapter, you can view hundreds more case studies at
postcardmania.com/case-studies.

Read all the case studies anyway — sometimes the best idea comes from learning what others are doing outside your own industry. And if you’d like more information on how we have succeeded in helping other businesses in your particular industry, just email us at info@postcardmania.com. Type in the subject line: “Case Study Request.”

Ziptron Energy

Industry

Fuel Distributor Franchise

Problem Trying to Solve

Ziptron Energy was looking for a way to recruit more independent gas stations to become part of their Mr. Zip franchise. Since this side of the business is focused on Business-2-Business (B2B) sales, Ziptron turned to direct mail to reach their exact target market with an SIC mailing list. (See Chapter 11 for a quick refresher on these lists if needed.)

The Campaign

Ziptron Energy chose a design that features an illuminated gas station, immediately signaling the postcard’s relevance to the recipient’s business. The strong headline immediately helped recipients recognize the benefits of becoming part of the Ziptron franchise — an instantly recognizable brand that will set them apart from competitors.

Mailing Lists

Ziptron Energy mailed their postcards to a single specialized mailing list over the course of 4 months (with 3 more months of mailings planned). They targeted independent gas stations in Tennessee and omitted franchises that had already bought into another brand. The precision of their list — targeting business owners that would be virtually impossible to reach through digital means alone — along with repetition contributed to their campaign’s success.

Results

This campaign generated 8 responses and Ziptron Energy converted 4 of these. They average about $20,000 a sale, meaning they generated around $80,000 in revenue! They only spent $1,759.20 on this campaign so far, so the current return on investment is 4,448% — a number that will continue to climb as they complete their campaign.

Good Hope Land and Timber Management

Industry

Land and Forestry Management

Problem Trying to Solve

Good Hope Land and Timber Management specialize in timber purchasing, harvesting and merchandising using sustainable forestry practices. Timber owners and harvesters are an extremely niche group of people, so Good Hope needed to find a targeted way to reach them. That’s where direct mail came in.

The Campaign

Their postcard design included a clear headline highlighting their specialty, the benefits of working with them, and a 5-star review from a former client that established credibility. To further maximize their campaign’s results, Good Hope ran a direct mail campaign integrated with online marketing, like I outlined in Chapter 19. Their postcards were bundled with ads on Google, Instagram, YouTube, Gmail, and Facebook via our Everywhere Small Business® package. The digital ads coordinated with their postcard design above and helped increase their exposure — and therefore the overall impression they make on their target market.

Mailing Schedule

Good Hope’s mailing schedule helped bring in a steady flow of business for them. They mailed between 10,000-13,000 postcards each month for 8 months; this consistency helped ensure timber owners would take notice of their message.

Results

So far, Good Hope has received 493 calls that tracked back to their postcard directly (using the call tracking number that comes free with Everywhere Small Business). They converted about 10% of those responses to sales, which is about 50 new customers! Good Hope Land and Timber Management reported being incredibly happy with the campaign response.

Steve Austin Music

Industry

Performing Musician

Problem Trying to Solve

Steve Austin is a Tennessee-based musician who tours the Southeast annually, showcasing his bluegrass-style music. He was looking for a better way to generate more bookings, so my team helped him come up with a campaign that would keep his schedule full.

The Campaign

Steve’s postcard design focused on the unique qualities of his performances and what sets him apart from other musicians. The overall design kept things simple, and the copy detailed the Steve Austin experience. It also contained a limited-time offer that featured the recipient’s name on his tour shirt with a booking.

He mailed to a list of a diverse range of businesses likely to host live music events, such as nursing homes, youth organizations, and restaurants. He sent out 1,000 postcards just twice when we spoke to him about his results.

Results

Steve booked 6 in-person shows after just two mailings, with more planned. Each booking earns him about $250 up front, so that is a total of $1,500 generated! And that doesn’t include tips he’ll make that day or the fact that many of his clients book year after year, resulting in a higher lifetime value of each booking.

Premier Softwash Solutions

Industry

Residential Cleaning

Problem Trying to Solve

Premier Softwash Solutions is an eco-friendly roof and housing exterior cleaning business located just outside of Orlando, FL. They were looking for an effective way to reach homeowners in a specific residential area, so we helped them with postcards.

The Campaign

To grab extra attention, they opted to send out 4” x 9” flyers in the mail. These aren’t your typical postcard size or shape, which makes them difficult to ignore.

The design featured:

• A clear and direct headline
• REAL before and after photos that create credibility
• Informative copy explaining the benefits of their unique eco-friendly cleaning process

Mailing List

They went with an Every Door Direct Mail campaign, which targets every house along a mail carrier route in the Orlando area near their business. This saved them a ton on postage and made the most sense since everyone can use their services; there’s no need for any micro-targeting.

Results

This campaign generated between 150-200 responses. They told us they typically close about 95% of their leads and the average job runs about $650. That means they would have generated over $100,000!

Results

Premier Softwash Solutions only spent $1,486 on their campaign — that makes their return on investment 6,629%!

Aldine Mail Route Animal Hospital

Industry

Veterinarian

Problem Trying to Solve

This animal hospital located in Houston, TX wanted to increase their new patient numbers in a big way. So, they called us for help to oversee a game-changing, year-long campaign that included mailing postcards and running coordinated Google and Facebook ads using our Everywhere Small Business® product.

The Campaign

We designed an animal service campaign for Aldine Mail Route Animal Hospital — plus matching online Google and Facebook ads — that positioned them as an all-in-one pet services provider.

They offer grooming, health services, surgery and boarding; everything a pet needs to stay happy and healthy.

The design worked really well for this campaign for several reasons:

• The cute photos of dogs and cats immediately grabbed their attention, especially the animal lovers.
• The coupons conveyed a lot of value and immediately let them know that they offer a number of services under one roof.
• They chose to include a map on the back of the card — I love this because they’re a local service that targeted nearby homes, so proximity is definitely a benefit.

They mailed consistently too — 5,000 postcards a month for 12 months, saturating the area around their practice with an Every Door Direct Mail mailing list. I love that they committed to a full year of marketing, and it paid off.

Results

Aldine Mail Route Animal Hospital brought in around 1,000 new animal patients that year, and they attribute that success to this campaign. They also increased revenue by 30% over the previous year!

Angel’s Pool Service

Industry

Pool Service

Problem Trying to Solve

Angel’s Pool Service, located in the small town of Reisterstown, MD, wanted to capitalize on the upcoming pool-opening season and came to us for ideas.

The Campaign

We helped them build a hyper-specific campaign with the goal of creating a revenue spike by only focusing on their pool opening service.

Since every one of their previous clients would need help opening their pools, we decided it was best to start by targeting a list of their previous customers.

A huge contributing factor for this campaign’s success was its timing. They sent out a single mailing of just 2,616 postcards at the end of March, right when people in Maryland start to think about using their pools again.

Results

Angel’s Pool Service estimates they received 800 responses from this campaign. They converted about 75% of those responses, which generated an estimated $350,000 in revenue. They only spent $1,320 on the campaign, resulting in a MASSIVE return on their investment of 26,415%!

CC’s Painting

Industry

Residential Painter and Cleaner

Problem Trying to Solve

CC’s Painting is a family-operated company offering a variety of residential home services. They wanted to reach more homeowners in the Tampa Bay, FL area and solidify their local brand.

The Campaign

To create a presence in their area, they started an Everywhere Small Business® campaign that included targeted postcards alongside matching digital ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram.

CC’s Painting opted for seasonal mailings. Every 3–4 months, they mailed a single drop of around 12,000 postcards, with additional ongoing exposure across Facebook, Instagram, and Google between mailings.

Results

On average, for every 40-50 calls they get from the postcards, they land about 15 jobs!

Country Farms

Industry

Grocer

Problem Trying to Solve

Country Farms is a local market in Edmonds, WA featuring seasonal produce. It’s a tough task to compete with the big, national grocery chains, so they came to us to devise a campaign that would boost their bottom line and make them more competitive than the big guys.

The Campaign

They decided on a direct mail marketing campaign bundled with Google, Instagram and Facebook advertising in our Everywhere Small Business® package. They targeted nearby residents with an Every Door Direct Mail mailing list to saturate the area and save on postage. Everyone’s gotta eat, right?

Their design used bright and engaging backgrounds of fresh produce to get the attention of prospects. In bright red, recipients immediately saw the 10% off coupon that this postcard offers. The back used a small paragraph to talk about the benefits of buying locally and provided a map so recipients could see just how close their location is.

Results

Country Farms said that over 150 coupons were redeemed! This might not even be all of the results, as many recipients may have come in and not spent enough money to use the coupon. In addition, they also saw a major increase in traffic to their website.

KSK Marina Clearwater

Industry

Full-Service Marina

Problem Trying to Solve

KSK Marina Clearwater wanted a way to promote their services that would expand their customer base. We worked with them to develop a structured marketing campaign that targeted a very specific niche — high-end home and boat owners.

The Campaign

Given the specific goals KSK Marina Clearwater set for their marketing campaign, we decided to target a very distinct group of homes in the area — a resident-occupant list of homeowners along Clearwater Beach with a median home market value of $200,000. This specificity helped ensure that each recipient owned a boat themselves or had enough disposable income to afford renting a boat from the marina. They decided to mail a 4” x 9” flier instead of a traditionally sized postcard to make sure their message stood out in the mail stack. Their design featured a cool color scheme and pictures of their facility with parked boats just waiting to be driven out to sea. Their five-star review built credibility and their map let recipients know immediately that they’re local.

Results

KSK Marina Clearwater received 9 new life-long customers! Of those new customers, 8 of them posted reviews and referred friends as well, and they’re still getting calls to this day. The cost of their services averages $2,000, so they’ve made an estimated $18,000 off this campaign!

Rose Wang Dentistry

Industry

Dental

Problem Trying to Solve

Rose Wang Dentistry in Lexington, MA has a lot to offer new and current patients. But breaking through the noise and reaching prospects in their area isn’t easy — so they turned to postcards for a more direct approach.

The Campaign

After consulting with our team, the dentists at Rose Wang Dentistry decided our Everywhere Dental marketing package offered the best chance for success in their market, since it’s a fully integrated service designed exclusively for those in the dental field.

Everywhere Dental consists of three tactics in one convenient package:

• A direct mail campaign to generate lots of quality leads and web traffic
• Digital ads matching your postcard design on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Gmail
• And the real kicker — it includes phone call analysis and scoring. This means a well-trained dental marketing professional personally reviews, analyzes, and rates each one of their tracked phone calls.

Rose Wang Dentistry mailed postcards to 9,000 residents living near their practice via an Every Door Direct Mail list. Using Everywhere Dental’s built-in tracking, they could tell exactly who was calling off the postcard and how many people followed the online ads back to their website.

Results

According to Rose Wang Dentistry, they gained an estimated 128 new patients from the postcards. The average lifetime value of their patients is about 2 years with each spending a minimum of $250 per year! That’s an estimated revenue of $64,000 over 2 years!

Latimore Group

Industry

Real Estate

Problem Trying to Solve

LaToya Latimore is the owner and business mind behind the Latimore Group real estate agency located in Blythewood, SC. She wanted to run a postcard campaign to get people talking about her services and reached out to us to get a direct mail campaign started.

The Campaign

LaToya Latimore left no marketing stone unturned with her campaign — she opted for our Everywhere Small Business® Platinum, which is an upgrade from the already-efficient Everywhere Small Business.

Everywhere Small Business® Platinum comes with:

• A lead-generating direct mail campaign
• Mail tracking that tells you when your cards will hit
• Call tracking to track and record all calls that come off the campaign
• Ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram
• The Platinum upgrade — ads on Gmail and YouTube

Latimore Group targeted a mailing list of homeowners more likely to sell their homes within the next 12 months. They also targeted homes in 5 specific zip codes where LaToya Latimore was looking to grow her presence as the go-to real estate agent for the area.

Results

At the time of this writing, her campaign is still active and they’ve already acquired 4 listings that have closed, generating them $30,000 in revenue!

Dungeness Pest Control

Industry

Pest Control

Problem Trying to Solve

Dungeness Pest Control is located in Port Angeles, WA. They were looking for a creative way to let nearby residents know they can help keep pests out of their home in the summer months, so they contacted PostcardMania for help.

The Campaign

Their postcard design was appealing and professional, with a headline that immediately touched on a main point for many: incoming summer months means incoming bugs. Yowsa!

They decided on a direct mail marketing campaign that blanketed homes along carrier routes near their business’s location with postcards.

Since pests don’t discriminate, everyone can use their services. They sent out 40,000 postcards to an Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) list and mailed out in May and June, which is the beginning of pest season.

Results

Dungeness Pest Control had 125 people redeem their coupon, generating $37,000!

Jill Wedeles Allstate Insurance Agency

Industry

Insurance

Problem Trying to Solve

Jill Wedeles is an Allstate Insurance agent located in Fort Myers, FL. She was looking for a better way to introduce local condo owners to her insurance policies, which cover second homes and their various uses (such as a long-term, short-term, or seasonal rentals), so she reached out to PostcardMania for ideas. She wanted a marketing strategy that would handle a bulk of her promotion automatically (and effectively). In other words, she wanted something that would be “set it and forget it.”

The Campaign

For the lead generation portion of the campaign, my designers put together a postcard design that used a bright contrasting color scheme to help the card (and message!) stand out in a cluttered mailbox.

Once prospects went to her website, the automated follow-up portion of the campaign kicked in. Prospects who visited the website were automatically tracked and shown follow-up banner ads after they left the site. The ads matched the design of the postcard, even using the same images. So it was an automatic (and super affordable) way to increase repetition and exposure — two must-have elements for successful marketing.

Results

She received 35 calls, 1,211 clicks on her online follow-up ads and 143,901 total online ad impressions (number of times the ad was seen).

The bottom line? Jill Wedeles Allstate Insurance Co brought in 20-30 new insurance policies from the postcard. She estimates these policies will generate approximately $10,000 a month! That’s an immediate ROI of 3,494% that will continue to grow exponentially going forward.

Swedish Auto Service

Industry

Automotive Repair

Problem Trying to Solve

This client, a Texas foreign car repair specialist, felt like they had more room to grow. Due to the expensive nature of their services, they wanted to nail down some more consistent customers with an advertising campaign, so they came to PostcardMania for ideas.

The Campaign

After weighing the options, Swedish Auto Service decided to go with a regularly scheduled Everywhere Small Business® campaign that bundled direct mail with Google, Instagram and Facebook ads.

As for the postcard’s design, they went with a sleek design featuring sparkling foreign vehicles. Since they were looking to acquire more regular customers, they went with an oil change deal, which isn’t that big of a financial commitment and is a good way to build trust and rapport.

The mailing lists targeted 2010-2017 BMW, Mercedes and Volvo owners in a 5-mile radius around their business. They ran 5 separate campaigns, each with 2 mailings per month, over the course of a year.

Results

Swedish Auto Service generates about 20-30 new customers on average, with each individual marketing campaign. The lifetime value of each client is typically around $2,000-$3,000!

The Wyatt Group

Industry

Real Estate Investment

Problem Trying to Solve

The Wyatt Group is a real estate investment company that was looking to acquire more properties, specifically from absentee homeowners (meaning the homeowner’s primary residence is somewhere other than the property). Located in Atlanta, GA, The Wyatt Group needed a marketing strategy that could offer excellent results and the ability to reach their specific audience.

The Campaign

For the lead generation portion of the campaign, my designers put together a postcard design that did an excellent job of immediately conveying their core marketing message: sell your home quickly. Their postcard featured a contrasting blue and orange, which grabbed the recipient’s attention.

One primary reason for this campaign’s success was the specificity of their mailing list. The Wyatt Group provided their own mailing list with the following specs, which delineate a type of consumer likely to be receptive to their messaging:

• Absentee homeowners that have owned the property for 10+ years
• Homes at least 1,000+ square feet containing 3-4 beds and 2 baths in the metro Atlanta area with equity between 1%-49%
• Single- and multi-family rentals with a purchase price between $10,000-$75,000

We delivered 15,000 postcards total to this list, split into 6 smaller mailings of 2,500. Selling a large asset like real estate isn’t a decision people come to lightly — it requires the kind of repetition The Wyatt Group offered in order to build trust and legitimacy with their target market. So, did it work?

Results

The Wyatt Group had already closed on 2 listings when we did the initial follow-up, which generated $22,000 in revenue. A great result that immediately more than doubled their initial campaign investment!

Hudson Greene Market

Industry

Grocer

Problem Trying to Solve

Hudson Greene Market is an organic, health-focused grocer located in the heart of Jersey City, NJ. They contact us with a desire to increase their clientele and boost revenue

The Campaign

Hudson Greene Market opted to target nearby residents with an Everywhere Small Business® (ESB) campaign, which combined direct mail postcards with matching digital ads on Google, Facebook and Instagram.

The design of their postcard was clean and simple. It immediately conveyed freshness, brightness and variety — something most people look for in a grocer. The large coupons on the back of their postcard offered real value and encouraged people to hold on to this postcard. Maybe you stick it on the fridge, put it on the counter or tuck it into a purse or bag — which is a great way to earn a ton of repeat impressions until it’s finally shopping day.

Where to purchase groceries is a decision that people take much more lightly than whether they want to sell their home. So they were able to get away with a single mailing of 6,000 cards to nearby residents. But remember — with Everywhere Small Business, interested recipients were still seeing digital ads for 3 more months following that mailing. These digital reminders are an excellent way to continue following up with recipients and building trust and credibility.

Results

The digital side of their campaign totaled 182,500 impressions and 1,491 clicks on their digital ads. As for the postcards, Hudson Greene Market counted 50 coupons redeemed in store, generating over $12,000 in income. This is an immediate ROI of 184%!

This ROI doesn’t even include repeat shoppers, who, now that they’ve gone there and bought something, will likely return again and again, boosting their ROI higher and higher over time. Remember the lesson from Chapter 7? It’s much harder to convince someone to be your customer the first time. Repeat orders are MUCH easier to attain than new ones.

American Land Ventures

Industry

Real Estate

Problem Trying to Solve

American Land Ventures is a real estate developer that runs Altaire Apartments, a brand new luxury multi-family rental property in Orlando, FL. Their management team wanted to introduce their newly finished property to the area, so they decided to host an open house event and get the word out to nearby renters through direct mail.

The Campaign

My team worked with American Land Ventures to target people most likely to sign a lease at a luxury apartment complex —renters already living in competing apartment complexes nearby. This audience had already demonstrated a few key things: they like the area; they’re renters, not homeowners; and they can afford a higher monthly rent.

Since their open house is a free, one-time event, renters aren’t likely to need much convincing to attend. A one-time drop of 5,000 postcards in February, prior to their open house, was enough to move the needle on this campaign and generate a result.

Results

American Land Ventures landed 37 new leases from people who attended the event, making it a massive success. The average number of new leases a month is 25, and they received 37 in just 2 weeks. They expect to receive an annual income of $69,000 from these new leases! They only spent $3,363.05 on this campaign, resulting in a 1,952% return on their investment!! And that’s just the first year’s return and doesn’t take multi-year residencies into account.