Have you considered a marketing partnership?
Staying in regular contact with your past, present, and future customers is vital to your success in business. That means you should be sending some kind of direct mail at least quarterly, and preferably more often. I recommend a newsletter, because when part of your mailing is “newsy” people are more apt to read instead of toss.
The trouble is, postage rates are climbing higher and higher and higher.
So why not share that cost with a complimentary business? What’s that? Any business that serves the same clientelle.
For instance, if you’re in real estate you could team up with almost anyone – but the most obvious would be insurance, landscaping, pool cleaning, house cleaning, home staging, house painting, plumbing, appliance sales – and the list goes on.
If you sell cars you could team up with the person who sells tires or does detailing – or even one who sells custom seat covers or truck bed liners.
If you’re a business accountant, you could team up with an office supply store or a commercial cleaning business.
The combinations and possibilities are endless – and can be a benefit to both of you – or all 3 or 4 of you. You not only save money by sharing postage, you are, in effect, recommending each other.
Think about who you know and go talk to them. It might be the beginning of something wonderful.
Meanwhile, get that second quarter mailing ready to go – the year is flying and your customers could, at this very moment, be forgetting about you!
Yours for success,
Marte
P.S. If you can’t decide what to say, or don’t have 3 or 4 hours to write a letter, call or write me. I’d love to tell your customers how great they’ll feel when they do business with you.
208-448-1479
writer@marte-cliff.com
Posted: April 6th, 2007 under advertising, effective marketing, newsletter, partnership, postage costs.
Comment from rfahel
Time April 8, 2007 at 6:44 am
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing – and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel