EDDM 101: Why Some Postcards and Flyers Don't Work

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today on the landscape business course podcast, we're gonna be answering a question that came in on YouTube about a failed every door direct mail campaign. And we're gonna talk about what might have gone wrong with this campaign to make it unsuccessful. Before we get into the show though, a thank you to lawn carewebdesign.com for sponsoring the show. If you haven't already, go check it out. It's a company that I started to make sure that you can start a website and make sure it's professional. Well done. Great for mobile SEO. Check it out today again, there's no upfront or contracts. It's really, really good value for what you're getting. Check it out today. Go to lawncarewebdesign.com all right, so today this is the question from Harold Kraus on YouTube. He said, Mike, I really need some advice here. I just did a run for 5,000 every door EDDM cards and I only picked up two clients and the timing is right. The areas I chose, high end homes, people that can afford it. Is this normal for these things to happen? Alright, so first things first.

So I cannot see the postcards that Harold sent out. However, we've done a lot of error direct mail. Next week we're sending out 32,000 flyers in a new market that we're going into. And so we get a lot of feedback and things that work and things that don't. All of this being said, I have had it where the same designs, the same piece of mail literally will flunk out and then the next time do great. Whether it be timing, whether it be the weather, whether it be the way that the person controls things that you cannot control, like the way the, the postmaster put it into the mailbox, the delivery guy, whether or not there was a big news event happening and they were looking for the newspaper and everything else got thrown away. There's a lot of factors that you can't control with every door direct mail that may or may not affect how many people call you. So let's just make that clear. Like news events, we always are trying hoping that there's no massive news events when we send out our every door direct mail on the week of. Because if there's not anything locally, super amazingly, they're gonna look through their other mail more diligently typically. But all of that being said, so taking the fact that there's a big variable on a lot of these things, what are some of the things you can do to reduce that and make Your every door direct mail piece better. Let's talk about those. First of all, pictures, creative and text. So basically what you see, I am not a big believer that this should be a very much of a blah, very branded piece of content. I'm much more about those pieces of mail being mail, doing direct marketing where they're asking for the sale, it's much more easy to track. It's much less nebulous. If you're just sending out a postcard to everyone saying that you do lawn care, landscaping services, having nice pictures, talking about yourself a little bit like that might do okay, but you're not driving them to do an action that is make, you know, pick up the phone or to have an email. So like that leads me to number two which is call to action. But before I get in that pictures, creative and text, I feel like there's a balance between being professional, making it look really nice, but also having some text driven content that makes a connection with them. You show your face and you make that personal connection and you drive them to number two which is calling to action. What is your call to action? What are you telling them to do? And a lot of pieces of mail that I get, they are not telling me to do anything. It's like an advertisement. It's like, hey, here's my business, here's what I do. If you need me, give me a call. I want to be driving them to do something like telling them pick up the phone, call me today or email me at, or go to this website, fill out this form and then we will do this and then this will happen. Like making it very clear in terms of what your relationship is, how it's going to initiate and telling them what to do. Alright, so on ours, on our tech side of our every door direct mail, we're literally telling them pick up the phone today and call us. We're creating as we're gonna talk about scarcity and we're having an offer and all that sort of thing. But we're always driving them to pick up the phone, driving them to a lead page or a webpage. And so traditionally mail getting them to call you is usually the best conversion. If you're doing something digitally, usually a landing page is gonna be the best optimized way of getting those leads because they're already online, they're already connected in that manner. Traditionally with, with mail, your phone is gonna be the best way to get them their best call to action. So that leads me to number three, do you have an offer? All right, so I don't know, Harold, again that I have not seen your piece of mail. But these are just some things that I've seen that people send out thousands of pieces of mail and I wonder why nothing happens.

So number three is offer. Do you make an offer? Is there a reason why you would put this in their mailbox? You'd pay to put this in their mailbox. What's the offer? Is it buy one, get one free? Is it a free estimate consultation? Is it pre property analysis? Is it a free corporation? Is it a free fertilization? What is the hook? What is the thing you're trying to get in with that makes them special, that they need to call you, they need to take action towards calling you? Your call to action, what is going to make them do that now? What's the offer? Okay, so I'm not a big fan of giving away free services up front. We traditionally will give something free away like a month in advance if we're trying to get a bunch of new customers. But traditionally outside of grand opening, we don't do anything free. We will advertise free property analysis or free estimates, but never do we offer free services unless we're in grand opening. And even when we do that, we're delaying those services for a month or so. So we might give a free correlation or free treatment or something like that that is going to be a little bit down the road. So that way we can get them on mowing service or on recurring service and then give that freebie down the road. And when it comes to that freebie, we want to make sure that something that is high margin so we're not losing a lot of money, not a lot of labor, not a lot of materials are being spent on it. So get creative with what you want to actually give away for free. I'm not a big fan of your first mowing for free. Not a fan. I'm not a fan of anything free really. But if you're gonna give something free, make sure it's something that's low labor, low material cost and high margin that you can give away. It's quick, simple, easy aeration is an easy one. Certain types of treatments that are cheap, those might be a good one that you can advertise as a free treatment. If they get on recurring mowing services and then do it a month after they've been on schedule. Number four, scarcity. This is something else you gotta create on these every door direct mail pieces. Why do they need to contact you now? You literally have five seconds to make an impression, to figure out if they even look at your piece of mail for a second glance. Then you gotta like, if they read it now, it's like, well, why would they call you now and not just pin you up on the refrigerator? And so what are you doing? What is your offer? But then what is the scarcity? To make sure they follow up and take you up on the offer and drive to your call of action. So you have scarcity that is going to create them to take advantage of the offer, which then gets them to go and take action. So that's the things you need them to do. Scarcity. What are the things you can do for this? You can say that it's valid for only 3 days. So that way when they get the piece of mail, they have three days to contact you and take advantage of the offer and make sure they get that call, that they actually do that call to action. So they do the call to action and they take you up in your offer. You give them a Scarcity offer of three days, that that offer is valid. You might do 12 or 15 or 20 spots available. If you're trying to fill your schedule for mowing, you say, hey, we have three more spots available in your neighborhood. Again, scarcity, you can do it by time, three days left, or you can do it by spots. How many spots are available left on your mowing route? And create the scarcity. So you've gotta have an offer, you've gotta have scarcity, you've gotta have a call to action. And all of that needs to be supplemented by good pictures and creative and text, whatever text or pictures you need to convey the offer, convey the scarcity and then drive them to a call of action is what's needed for a successful piece of every door, direct mail. And that being said, the big reason we talk about scarcity is because a lot of times, Harold, don't count this ad campaign maybe out yet, because a lot of people will put it on their refrigerator, they will put it on their office desk and you'll get contacted three or six months later. It is very hard to track that in terms of roi, return on investment when it comes to your EDDM campaign. So we'd rather them contact us right away. That's why we create the scarcity. So you could take the scarcity part out if you're like, well, I don't really want to do that. What if they want to contact me in a month, that's fine, but it's going to be hard for you to track and get good results and good metrics of how your marketing is doing unless you create the scarcity and you know where those leads are coming from. But Harold, if you did not have that, don't count it all as loss yet, because you can get a lot of customers down the road that they keep that piece of mail. That's the nice thing about mail. It's not like on a Facebook feed. Once it's gone, they forget about it if they didn't save it. Like with piece of mail, it can go on their fridge, it can go in their office, it can get handed around. So there's definitely probably gonna be residual benefits of having this campaign that you sent out. But I'd much rather have scarcity, which creates all the leads coming right away and therefore leads to better metrics and analytics of what's working in your marketing. So I hope that helped you, Harold. I hope that help everyone out there was their every door direct mail campaign. Those are the four things you gotta think about. Scarcity towards an offer, towards going to a call to action. All supplemented by great pictures, creative and text. I hope that helps. Today you've been listening to Mike and he's on the landscape business course podcast. Until next time, be great. Nothing else pays.