Best
Way To Advertise
If
you’re going to have a Store Closing Sale or High Impact
Inventory Reduction Sale it is extremely important that the
sale gets off to a extremely strong start. You must achieve
a high return for your advertising. That means that it must
be targeted and create traffic right now.
The best way to do that is a direct mail campaign. That
means a piece mailed directly to your customer list or if
you don’t have a customer list then you must buy a list of
possible customers in your market area and mail to them.
A direct mail piece to your store’s customer list will
always produce the best response. That response is often as
high as 5% – 8%. That means that if you mail 1000 pieces,
you should expect from 50 to 80 customers to respond to
that direct mail piece. I always recommend using a well
designed letter in matching envelop mailed
1st
Class
presort when mailing to your customer list.
If you don’t have a customer list, you should do a
saturation mailing to your immediate market area. Your
market area in most cities is an area in a two to three
mile radius around your store. You might think that your
market area is larger, but research as determine that in
most cases it is not. The more rural your area is, the
farther out your market area goes. Saturation mail list can
be purchased from list brokers or in some cases the company
doing the printing can supply the mail list.
A well-designed direct mail piece used in a saturation
mailing will usually produce a 1% - 2% response. That means
to get the same number of customers in the door you need to
mail more pieces. Most saturation mailings use standard
rate postage. This allows you to mail more for the same
amount when compared with presorted 1st
Class
used when mailing to your customer list. When doing a
saturation mailing, we suggest that you consider a well
designed postcard.
The reason we suggest a well-designed postcard is that it
does not have to be opened to have its message delivered.
When you mail to your customer list you already have a
relationship with the recipient, it is more personal and
they will open it if that relationship is good.
In both
cases the direct mail piece must be well-designed and
contain some consistant elements if it is going to be
effective in generating traffic. Using an experience retail
marketing consultant to help you with your sale should
assure that your direct mail campaign is successful.
