Most Interesting Findings
My main work plan was to provide various neighborhoods with fliers, coupons and other ads linked with our service. We created our own direct marketing lists and filled them with people who were obviously going to buy our services. College students were one of our primary targets so each student neighborhood was carefully assessed. However, after six months of doing this with no results, we had to rethink our gameplan.
We didn’t think that our direct mail lists were the problem. We hit different student neighborhoods every month, so one way or another we should have been getting everyone. The problem was that we were using so much money printing up thousands and thousands of fliers that we were not making enough on pizza sales to cover expenses. Finally, we hit a wall. We knew that we had to hire a direct marketing company to boost sales or we would go under in the next 18 months or so.
It was a good consolation to find out that the direct marketing lists were not the problem. Once we hired a company to help us do this, they suggested that we take it a step further and expand our target areas. What they wanted to do was to add door- to-door salespeople who would sell our coupon books to customers. This was on top of the direct marketing lists we had.
At that point, I was willing to try anything. I had expected them to use scientifically targeted direct mail lists, but I was open for any new strategy. As long as it was something that we hadn’t tried before, it might be worth a shot.
This turned out to be a very effective method indeed. Companies provide coupons all the time. However, if you have an effective salesperson selling your coupon books right at your customers’ doorstep then they will do what they can to use it up by purchasing your product.
At the prices we were selling pizzas, we would not make much money off of each new customer, but it didn’t really matter there were so many new people coming in that we didn’t know what to do with them! It turns out that direct marketing lists aren’t the solution. Good door-to-door salesman are!
Tags: Business, direct mailing lists, direct marketing
Posted in Business · November 8th, 2009 · Comments (0)
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