Direct Mail Pieces

No Junk Mail Please

Alright, alright! I know what you’re thinking. Junk mail. Am I right? Well, if you’re using direct mail the way 99% of business use it, then yes, junk mail.

And wasted marketing dollars(especially for a small lawncare company.)

But let’s take a look at how to make it work for you.

Typically, your first step in direct-mail would be to design a campaign. What? A campaign? Is this some sort of Crusade or something? YES! Exactly. You’re wasting your money if you only send one mailing. Or even if you send multiple mailings which aren’t consistent.

You should decide what the purpose and thrust of each campaign will be. To brand your company? To sell new fertilization jobs? To dominate a neighborhood? You must know so that you can design each mailing.

You should target an area (the area you want to concentrate in) and blanket them with your campaign.

Your List Of Prospects

Next, you would typically buy a list of addresses with names. But, I wouldn’t. Instead, collect these names and addresses yourself. This allows you to “laser-target” your market. There are resources at your public library in the reference section which contain listings of homeowners by street address (along with much useful information such as telephone, years in residence, etc.) Target a few streets and be sure everyone on the street gets on your list.

A little more complicated method would be to use the whitepages.com. Just click on the People Search tab, then click Find Neighbors tab. Here you can enter an address on a street and your search will return all the neighbors’ names with address on the street (minus all the other useful information.)

Just a side note about collecting this information—if you use telemarketing, this is a primo way to target your market, but be aware of the laws surrounding the Do Not Call Registry (more on this in another post.)

The Package

The next thing to do is design your campaign pieces. Letters or postcards? Trifolded paper in newsletter format or a complete package in a manila envelope? Now, spend some time here with me. This is very important. Your package must raise enough curiosity to get opened and read. Whether its intriguing words on the envelope, the size of the envelope, the method in which it was delivered, something about the package has to make your prospective customer want to open the package.

Need some ideas? How many large manila envelopes do you receive in the mail each week? Do they get opened? Probably so. If you received a birthday card sized envelope with nothing on the outside but your address handwritten, wouldn’t you be curious to see who sent it? Use your imagination. Since this mailing is on a small scale (you probably aren’t going to target 5000 people all at once) you may be able to afford to send a package that would have been cost prohibitive on a larger scale.

What about including some novelty item? Well, the general rule is that if the novelty item is actually useful, it will likely be kept around. For example, my kids hang pictures on the refrigerator all the time. So I always keep those business card magnets that come in the pieces I receive. Benefit to me : extra magnets on the fridge. Benefit to sender : their name and number always in sight close to my phone.

That’s about enough to digest in one post, so stay tuned for Part II, where we’ll cover what to actually say in the pieces you’ll be mailing.

Get marketing tips you can really use to grow your lawncare
business, every week, delivered straight to your Inbox!
Just join my Yahoo!Group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/greenbizmarketing
or send a blank email to
greenbizmarketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Marketing With Email Newsletters

Staying At The Top Of Their Mind

Let’s face it – while your customers may be at the top of your mind, you probably aren’t at the top of theirs. After all, they are busy, which is why they hired you. But if you want your marketing efforts to pay off, you have to get yourself to the top of their minds (or at least close!) Here’s one way to do that – with an email newsletter.

Why is an email newsletter better than a paper newsletter? Well, to begin with, cost. It is much less expensive to press the Send Button in your email program than it is to cart 100 or 200 folded paper newsletters to the post office and pay postage for them.

Also you can afford to send communications much more frequently. As often as weekly wouldn’t be out of line. Keep in mind, the more often a customer sees your message, the more likely they are to eventually buy your offer (just don’t over do it with the emails – you don’t want to be compared to a spammer!)

Use HTML Templates for consistency

It’s a great way to brand yourself. If there is a consistent theme to all of your emails, and they all look alike, only the content is changed, your customers will recognize your newsletter and maybe even look forward to receiving it. You can achieve consistency in look by using an HTML template. These are widely available online, many for free.

Not Too Long, Just Short and Sweet

A newsletter in email format doesn’t have to be as long as a paper newsletter either. Really, if you received a single page, paper newsletter, with only a single article o the front, maybe an ad for one of your services, and not enough content to fill the back, let alone another page, you wouldn’t perceive much value from it, would you? I know if that newsletter showed up in my mailbox, it would probably find its way to the recycling bin pretty fast.

But an email newsletter is just the opposite. It needs to be short and to the point. It needs to be packed with information and a call to action in a relatively short space.

Your customers will stop opening your emails if they always require 30 minutes to read. Email is supposed to help us get things done faster, not tie us up.

Short messages at regular, frequent intervals will help to keep you at top of mind position with your customers.

What Information Would You Put In A Newsletter?

Timely, useful information. For example, in the Spring you could let your customers know what weeds are getting ready to germinate. And how they can prevent it. If you use great detail to explain the process, it may convince them to use your service. After all, you just showed them you know your stuff well enough to explain it, and after all those steps it just sounds like it would be easier to hire you.

If you’re experiencing a drought, you need to let your customers know about the benefits of xeriscaping – and that you are the local expert.

You could create a series of articles that explain the most common threats to lawns in your local area. And the answers to the threats which leads to your service which just happens to address each of those threats.

The subject in the email newsletters can be very specific or very general as long as it is useful to your customers. One successful strategy is to make them useful, but incomplete. There is enough information to be of use to the customer, but they need to contact you to get all of the information.

For example, to use the weed germination scenario, you could write about all the weeds which are about to germinate in thier lawn, how to identify them, what its going to make the lawn look like, and generally how the lawn could be treated with a pre-emergent herbicide. For the exact chemicals, methods of application, etc. they could contact you, or, of course, they could hire you and forget these weeds ever existed.

The Goal In Marketing Is To Get Sales

Be creative, but not over the top. You want your message to be remembered, not your marketing. All your marketing has one goal – to get more sales, not to win awards. Don’t worry about creating the perfect newsletter from the start. Just get started and perfect it as you grow.

Get marketing tips you can really use to grow your lawncare business, every week, delivered straight to
your Inbox! Just join my Yahoo!Group at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/greenbizmarketing or send a blank email to
greenbizmarketing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Your Marketing Plan Calendar

What’s Your Calendar Look Like?

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin

Have you ever seen a successful contractor build a house without a plan? Probably not. Consider that your marketing is just like a house – if you don’t start with a plan, how will you know if you have achieved your desired goal?

My wife and I bought a small house in need of some minor, cosmetic remodeling. So minor, in fact, that we thought we didn’t even need to create a plan for it. We thought we knew what we needed to accomplish and we could just barrel through it and be done without defining what our end result would look like or what steps needed to be done.

Well as you can guess, a simple three-week makeover turned into a 4-year remodel, with no space in the house escaping changes.

What happened? We didn’t have a plan to spell out exactly what needed to be done. So alot of things were done which we hadn’t originally intended to do. And alot of things were done twice, because we did them in the wrong sequence and wasted alot of time and energy.

So what does my house fiasco have to do with your marketing? Well, your marketing is a lot like that little house. If you don’t start with a plan, you’ll not know if it is successful, you’ll not have a goal to achieve, you’ll waste time and money and effort, and the whole “marketing thing” begins to drag on and feel boring and tedious.

But, if you start with a plan, you can see and know progress, you’ll know at any point if you’re on track or not, and you can be confident enough in your progress to make necessary changes.

So, what’s a marketing plan look like? Well, for now it should be something simple enough that you’ll use it, right? I suggest, as many marketers do, that you assemble a 52 week calendar to outline your marketing thrust for each week. Each week on the calendar will have one, maybe two marketing tools on which you will focus. Sometimes your focus for a tool will span many weeks.

My office is very computerized – the less paper, the better(I believe in the power of the PC to keep my files organized and accessible) but my marketing calendar is on paper. In my paper based planner. That just works best for me. You need to do what works best for you (that means do it in such a way that you’ll actually use it!)

You will constantly revise it (which is why I use pencil in my planner) by adding more of the marketing tools which seem to work and removing the marketing tools which don’t work. You will take notes on your calendar to show results of your marketing each week. Or to show changes to your marketing thrust.

And I save my calendars. They are a treasure trove of research info. You will be able to look at previous years and see trends in response to your marketing. You will see that some marketing tools are more useful in certain months. You will see that some tools were of no use at all. With all of this research at your fingertips, you’ll be able to plan each marketing calendar with greater and greater precision.

You can download a blank marketing calendar to print out for your planner if you prefer to use paper at my Yahoo! Group called “Green Biz Marketing” (see link below.)

So, how do you get started? First, you need to have a list of at least 10 marketing tools you can use right now in your business. This list will change as you discover new tools and weed out tools that don’t work for you.

Second, you need a specific marketing budget, even if it is zero dollars to begin with (such as with a new bootstrap business.) Surprisingly, there are a number of marketing tools that cost no money to implement. Your marketing budget should be expressed as a percentage of revenue. For example, if you had a marketing budget of 3% and you made sales of $10,000 for the month, your budget would be $300 for the next month. As business increases so does your marketing budget.

Third, place your marketing tools on the calendar for the next 52 weeks with a brief description of how you will use each one and how much of the marketing budget each will require.

Fourth, at the very least, review your marketing calendar at least weekly to prepare for the next few weeks of marketing action. Are you getting ready to send out a mailing? Get your sales copy ready now. Are you having a promotion for organic fertilizer? Be sure to line up access to the necessary supplies if the promo is wildly successful. Keep in mind that some of your tools will overlap weeks, and some may even run all 52 weeks.

Lastly, at the end of each week, record the results as they relate to each tool’s effectiveness. How many new leads did you get from your website? Your local paper ad? How many upsells did you get from your last customer mailing? Record these on your marketing calendar and when you prepare your next calendar you will know which tools were successful, ans which months you need to work in more tools.

As simple as this calendar is, it really can be your single most effective marketing and business building tool. Just keep it flexible, keep it close to you, and keep using it.

If you’d like to get weekly marketing tips to your inbox,

join my Yahoo! Group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/greenbizmarketing