Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

TommyCarey Level X³

September 20, 2016, 11:12 pm

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Tons of people here work online and can easily set up an email campaign, but not many of us own a brick and mortar physical location that we have foot traffic coming to.

I was thinking about opening a bar and grill in my town since it's pretty big and the medium household generates around $120,000+ per year. So I know there's money here and I also know that everyone needs to eat and could use a beer every once in a while lol Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

I know that there are a lot of bar and grills out there in the world so competition is pretty stiff.

So I started thinking how I could do some snail mail marketing since it would be super difficult getting everyones emails lol. I always get mail from restaurants within 5 miles of my house and started to look into how they get their mail out and to my house. I quickly stumbled upon Every Door Direct Mailing, or EDDM for short, and it seems pretty amazing. It can get expensive, but it's worth it in the long run if you can afford to run a campaign each week.

So for EDDM you can use a service that will set everything up, or you can do it yourself. Doing it yourself will save you a lot of money because you're cutting out the middle man.

You can go to usps.com and figure out where you want to send mail out to. The only downside is that you can only choose 5,000 mailings per run. You can purchase multiple runs, but you'll have to do it separately from one another.

I chose to check houses around where I live and targeted only households that generate over $150,000 per year. Below is an image of what you will see if you test it out.
Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

I am targeting just over 4,800 homes totaling $1297.79 for one mailing. Each area has a different cost so you could see a higher or lower total when you build up the area you want to mail to.

Once you find out what households and routes you want to target, you'll need to figure out what king of mail you want to send. Sending out post cards with coupons is your best bet to get people walking through the door. But you can't make just any type of post card, it needs to have a section on the back where the post office can post their information on it in order to get it to the right homes. I'm not positive if you can get them printed by the post office or if you're suppose to do it yourself. I do know that you have to drop off the post cards yourself and set everything up with an in full payment.

Has anyone ever done EDDM in the past or still does it today?

Thanks,

Razzy

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Lynne

Oh my gosh that looks like quite a cool service to use for a physical business Razzy and no I have not heard of them before. I am about to launch a new website which is local (only targeting a few towns in my country) so this might be an amazing service for me to use... well that is if it is available in South Africa and I'll be honest here I sincerely doubt it will be!

I can certainly see how this would be a really great way to target people in a specific area. I do think though that your mail must be outstanding to be noticed. When I get my mail I don't even look at the junk mail at all, not unless it is bright and unique so that is seriously catches my eye!

10 years ago

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TommyCarey

I totally agree, you have to make the mail stand out a lot in order for it to get noticed. I would study how much mail you get on certain days and try to get your mailing out on the days that you get only a couple pieces. This will increase the chances of getting noticed and not fall into the recycling bin with the junk mail Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

I actually have a website in the works that will revolve around investing. I might test out this method and target only homes with 150k or more yearly income so that I know they have the money to invest Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

I obviously make a commission on each investment, but I would have to do a lot of testing before I knew if this method was worth it.

10 years ago

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Lynne

Yeah I had a look, it is US only.. as usual with really cool services LOL

Yes I think this would work well depending on the type of business and like I mentioned the actual ad too. I love the fact you can target not just specific areas but households with specific income groups. That will really come in handy. It doesn't help marketing to people that are scraping by and cannot afford what you are offering.

10 years ago

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Cristian

No, I didn't do this kind of stuff but now that I think about it may be a great idea, especially for local restaurants and bars. And 850 bucks for 4500 homes is not that expensive if you ask me. Are you going to send them all at once? Aren't you worried they respond in great numbers? What are you going to do if 150 of them will actually come in the same day? Can you handle such a big crowd?

Guess this kind of campaigns need a little testing first. A couple of months ago I got a flyer about a new restaurant in my area, after 2 weeks or so I was looking for a place to eat and I remembered getting the flyer about a brand new restaurant so I went with my wife. The food was decent but the place was small and badly located, I won't be going there again probably.
This is another thing to consider, first impression is key, you want to impress people enough so they want to come back and become regulars.

10 years ago

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TommyCarey

If I were to do this I would plan to have a 0.5% success rate, meaning that I would see 24 people or families come through the door with the coupons I sent out. Now this doesn't sound like much, but if you have a family of 4 coming in for dinner, that's easily a $90+ check at the end of the night, and that's if they adults don't have a beer or glass of wine lol Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

So that would be 24x60 which equals $3,440 coming in. I spent $3300 so that means I would really pull in $890. Now with restaurants they only make about 10% to 15% on the food, so I would only be pulling in around $300 to $350 if I were lucky lol. But in this type of market you can't expect to pull in a huge profit from one ad campaign. You'll profit in the long run by the families that continually come in month after month because they love the food, atmosphere, waiters, drinks, etc. If the patrons had a good time they'll usually come back in and drop another $90. And the best thing is that when people have a great time at a restaurant, they tend to let people know by word of mouth or checking in on facebook which is FREE advertising Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

So if you could put $30,000 into this type of marketing, you'll see a quicker ROI than if you took baby steps. Obviously you'll want to do some split testing to see what works best, but after you tweak everything and it's performing very well, I would dump much more money into it Every Door Direct Mailing (EDDM) is it worth it?

Well I never pulled the trigger and opened my bar and grill because I was too busy and couldn't invest enough time into it since I'd have to be there 40+ hours a week and if I did that my other ventures would suffer a lot. Spending $850 for 4,500ish houses is pretty cheap indeed. I wouldn't be worried about a flood of traffic because with this type of marketing you don't get a huge response rate. You would need to keep hitting the same areas over and over again to convert them. So realistically you'll be paying 3x what the image shows just so you can get your postcard in front of the same people multiple times. Repetition is key here :) If I were to do this I would plan to have a 0.5% success rate, meaning that I would see 24 people or families come through the door with the coupons I sent out. Now this doesn't sound like much, but if you have a family of 4 coming in for dinner, that's easily a $60+ check at the end of the night, and that's if they adults don't have a beer or glass of wine lol :D So that would be 24x60 which equals $1,440 coming in. I spent $850 so that means I would really pull in $590. Now with restaurants they only make about 10% to 15% on the food, so I would only be pulling in around $100 to $150 if I were lucky lol. But in this type of market you can't expect to pull in a huge profit from one ad campaign. You'll profit in the long run by the families that continually come in month after month because they love the food, atmosphere, waiters, drinks, etc. If the patrons had a good time they'll usually come back in and drop another $60. And the best thing is that when people have a great time at a restaurant, they tend to let people know by word of mouth or checking in on facebook which is FREE advertising :D :D :D So if you could put $10,000 into this type of marketing, you'll see a quicker ROI than if you took baby steps. Obviously you'll want to do some split testing to see what works best, but after you tweak everything and it's performing very well, I would dump much more money into it :D

10 years ago

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RaduV

That's a more accurate way to do flyers advertising. There are shops/stores in my areas that are placing all kinds of flyers in my door, fence, postbox and they even throw them in my yard. I'm not saying that it won't work but the usual response of this action is throwing the flyer to the garbage, sometimes withouth even reading it.

You should know that we(humans, or customers) like our habbits. You can notice this behaviour in small towns, cities where you don't have too many options. You get used to a place, a bar or even a restaurant and if something new is opening, is hard to shift the customers.

For instance, me and Cristian are going at the same bar since we were in 9th grade. We don't enjoy the bar particulars that much but we like the owner so it's our place. There are other bars around which we visit but not that often as this particular one.

Also, what do you do if you hand out the mail with the coupons and you don't get enough customers to recover the expenses? What will you do if you will not have enough space to accomodate them, if they will come?

10 years ago

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Barida

It's nice to know that Every Door Direct Mailing can provide emails that we can send our marketing ads to every now and then. In as much as I've received some in the past that irritated me, I think running it well will go a long way to getting more sales to the firm.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

We live in a middle class village with many commercial establishments in the main road leading to the village gate. Every once in a while, we receive flyers and leaflets delivered by a local courier. Most nearby businesses use that flyer method. There’s the LPG delivery, laundromat, even home service massage. And from the looks of it, that method of distributing the promo material is still effective. However, it is only applicable for a local business and the marketing is in nearby areas only.

9 years ago

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