A Question with No Good Answer

By: Mike Ryan
President- Cactus Mailing Company

“What type of response rate can I expect?” It is the question that we field the most and it is also the question that is the toughest to answer. Clients always want to know exactly how many phone calls they are going to get from their mailing. Unfortunately, there is no good answer as there are just too many variables involved. For instance, if you sell pet grooming services and decide to send out a postcard mailing to generate some business. If you mail the postcards to everyone in a particular zip code (many whom won’t even have pets!) you would likely only receive a handful of phone calls. However, you would probably receive quite a few more responses if you mailed them only to people who owned pets. You would receive even more phone calls if you offered a substantial discount on your services!

You see, when it comes to direct mail postcards, it isn’t about how many people respond to your marketing, it’s about your return on investment (ROI). Your ROI is the true measure of success in any direct mail campaign because you are focusing on how much revenue is coming in, not how many phone calls you get after sending your postcards off. Here’s why your ROI is so important: You could send off 10,000 postcards and only get ten people call you back, which would look like a mere 0.1% response rate, however, out of those ten who called you may get five who turn into long term clients, giving you business for life…which pays off greatly in the end!

Let’s take a more personal look:

John owns a pool care service. He charges roughly $100 a month for weekly pool service and chemical treatment. To get more business flowing his way, John decides to send out a postcard mailing. He spends $800 to print and mail 2,500 postcards to homeowners with pools. Out of those 2,500 postcards, 12 call him to ask about his service and six actually hire his company to service their pool. This means John will generate an additional $600 per month ($7200/year) in revenue for his one-time investment of about $800.

You see, you cannot just base a successful marketing campaign by number of responses because it is far more important to get more revenue than it is to get more phone calls. Responses mean nothing unless there is money and business to back them up. Positive ROI’s are what businesses should look for, not percentage based response rates.

Cactus Mailing operates on the thought of helping businesses increase their revenue through postcard marketing. We will help you with your design, your text and even your mailing lists! While we would love to see you get high response rates, we’d love even more to see you increase your revenue and build a long term customer base! Cactus Mailing, your one stop direct mail place for positive ROI’s!