Direct Mail Postcards Prove a Flop
Making customers aware of your product or service is quite a task. For the first time ever, I decided to try direct mail. I used a list of local Hillsboro, OR based businesses, hand selected 1,000 of them so I didn’t send them to companies like Intel and Yahoo!. I spent $500 on the whole deal, which is a lot of money for me to be spending.
I designed the cards, set up a landing page that continued the same message, created the web sign up forms, and sent the cards off. Two weeks later, not a single person called or filled out the web form. About 10 visitors went to my landing page.
On the bright side of all this? Close to 1,000 businesses have at least seen my name and logo – this could help as I continue my marketing efforts.
on Oct 16 in Video Blog tagged direct mail, marketing, Video Blog by Bob PotterTime Invested – August
Getting Hostwell off the ground has been a much bigger task than I had anticipated. So far I’ve spent about 33+ hours on it. Here is a break down by task:
- Design – 1.4 hours
- Website Development – 11.6 hours (includes both site and blog setup/coding)
- Writing Content – 14.3 hours (writing, editing, having my wife edit, etc.)
- Hosting – .6 hours (setting up hosting account, email, etc.)
- Email Newsletter Announcement – 5 hours
- Social Media – .5 hours
Why did I spend so much time on my newsletter?
While I enjoy writing, I do struggle with it at times. I start writing something only to erase it, then start with something else. I’ll finish it, read through it and decide it doesn’t send the message I want to get across. So I start over. Then I have my wife edit it and offer suggestions. After a few test sends and with an increased heart rate I push the “Send” button as it goes out to my contacts…hoping for the best.
Room for Improvement
There are a number of things I can improve upon:
- I write my website content in Coda so that I can see it on the website. Being visual, it really helps me develop the copy (at least I think it does). As you can imagine, writing it in Coda and constantly going to my FTP client to refresh and upload the file adds lots of time. It’s a bad habit and one I really need to correct. My goal is to write the content in something like Evernote and then add it to the site once it has been fully edited. I imagine I’d spend 20% less going this route.
- When I started designing this site I had a few ideas. Most of which came from Jason’s mockup of Basecamp, Freshbooks, Mail Chimp, 37 Signals, and a few other websites. Why did I “borrow” from these fine websites? Because I look up to them and because I borrowed Seth Godin’s philosophy that there is no reason to try and come up with something entirely new – he basically says, “don’t start from scratch.” If I had started from scratch, I would have spent far more hours designing something and it wouldn’t have added any value.
- I didn’t do much “marketing” before hand. I’m more of “gotta have all my ducks in a row” kinda guy. Plus I’m better off focusing on one task than figuring out how to generate some interest and do it effectively. Throughout this process I wished I had a partner to help with things like this.
