Drop Shipping Business

Compared the Effective Ways for Direct Small Business Sale

November 4, 2009 at 5:54 AM | Posted in Mail Order, Small Business | Leave a Comment
Tags: advertising, business, direct mail, Mail Order, media, order, press, press advertising

Direct mail

The major strength of direct mail is that your advertising goes only to specified individuals. Provided that the list of individuals you use has been carefully compiled and maintained, none of your money is wasted — as it invariably is in press advertising — sending your sales message to people who are definitely never going to buy your product.

Consider again the hamster example. If you could get a list of hamster owners who have in the recent past actually bought pet products by mail, you could post your advertising literature direct to exactly the sort of people you want to reach.

A further advantage is that you can get much more information into a mailshot than into a press advertisement. The cost of press advertising is roughly proportionate to the size of the advertising space; if a given ad costs £50, another 10 times the size is likely to cost £500. Direct mail costs, however, do not increase in the same simple fashion. Apart from printing — whose unit costs, anyway, decline as volume increases — it costs no more, for example, to mail an A4 sheet crammed both sides with information than to mail the same sheet with just a single sentence on it.

Door-to-door leaflets

Door-to-door leaflet distribution is cheap but indiscriminate, your sales message going to all the households of a particular area with no account being taken of the different interests and inclinations of the people in those households. This form of advertising is probably appropriate only for products likely to interest householders as householders — house security devices, decorating aids etc. There is, however, a system of area classification which aims to identify where there are concentrations of people likely to be responsive to particular promotions. This is the ACORN system and you may like to look into this if household leafleting appeals to you.

However, as has been said already, mail order is a nationwide business, and both press advertising and direct mail can put you in touch with the national market. While it is possible to conduct door-to-door advertising on a national scale, to do so would involve millions of households, and despite the relatively low unit costs, the scale and expense of such an operation rules it out for most mail order ventures. Even if your costs are no more than £20 per 1000, a campaign to reach 5 million households would set you back £100,000, and you would still not have reached the national market of upwards of 30 million households.

If, despite this, you think that the method might be particularly suitable for your product, you can conduct a very cheap experiment by pushing your leaflets through 1000 letterboxes in the nearest town.

Radio and TV

Although these have been used for mail order advertising, the beginner would do well to keep clear of them. You can get through your advertising money at alarming speed, and you depend upon your potential customers having pen and paper handy to jot down — and jot down correctly — price, address, phone number and other ordering information before your message vanishes into the ether.

Prestel and other interactive electronic media

These have not yet established themselves in a big enough way to make them suitable for mail order to the general public. They are perhaps worth considering only if your product appeals specifically to those enthusiasts who are already hooked up to electronic mailboxes and other marvels of the moment.