Beyond Junk Mail

CASE STUDY- CREATING A MAILOUT CAMPAIGN THAT DOESN’T GET TOSSED

Resicom, which primarily conducts commercial facility maintenance, decided to focus on active growth of our residential division by implementing a mail-out marketing campaign.  The campaign would target residential properties for exterior painting projects, introducing our company and the renovation/remodeling and repair services we provide.  

Scope

The scope of work needed to complete this campaign:

1. Create a pertinent, attractive mailer that not only introduced our company but was an actual project proposal with individualized pricing. 
2. Acquire all the material necessary to create a bound, professional marketing piece.
3. A goal of 3,000 mailers per week was established.
4. Deadline was set to have all proposals mailed by end of July so that external painting projects could be executed during optimal summer months.
5. Determine the amount of labor that would be required to produce and package each proposal.

Challenges

The challenges of this project included:

1. Traditionally, mailing campaigns have a low rate of return at only 1-2%.  
2. Resicom has only one binding machine in our possession. 
3. Allocation of current Resicom employees for proposal production would be limited as they were responsible for maintaining a high level of service to existing clients.  
4. Materials would be need to be purchased in bulk to be cost effective.

Solution

Rather than rely on a general introduction piece that would be easily dismissed and discarded, we decided to create an actual proposal for individual homeowners.  This required additional preparation work as we would need to have experienced employees first travel to targeted neighborhoods and establish the pricing structure per house.  Once researched, we created a professional proposal to submit to specific homeowners by name.  Temporary help was contracted to produce the marketing pieces with assembly line efficiency.  Required materials were researched and price compared so that suppliers that dealt in bulk purchasing could be contacted.

Our solution for the project included:

1. Creating personalized proposals based on neighborhood reconnaissance.
2. Utilizing a database company to provide names and addresses of homeowners in targeted neighborhoods owning houses that were older than 5 years, thereby increasing chances that exterior painting would be needed.  
3. Material purchasing was coordinated through multiple suppliers to obtain necessary materials required at value pricing.
4. A second binding machine was located and loaned to our company for the duration of the campaign.
5. Temporary staffing was secured and a labor schedule was created to maximize efficiency.

Summary

This marketing campaign was a tremendous undertaking and needed to have a detailed execution plan to meet our goals.  We believe that the extra time required to research specific project scopes increased our overall response rate by adding value to our marketing proposals.