Business and Management Forum -- Marketing Ideas
Cabinetmakers discuss email marketing, Google ads, and other methods for bringing in new business. February 11, 2010
Question
Does anybody have a targeting mailing campaign that works? I've been sending out mail to the neighborhoods where we just completed jobs and sending keep in touch emails to past customers every six weeks or so. What do you find that's working?
Forum Responses
(Business and Management Forum)
From contributor R:
We use a quick, humorous postcard every month to remind the folks that we are around. It has worked well for a few years now. I really like that it keeps our name in front of our smaller volume customers that we do not see as often. It is called Bits, but we changed the name to Splinters. In this day of digital marketing, I have found that people remember a postcard.
From contributor E:
Have you heard of Yelp? It's a web-based consumer review site (www.yelp.com). It's nation-wide, but has a larger presence in metropolitan areas. California has one of the largest collection of Yelp locations. We have gotten a couple of leads recently from people who have read reviews posted by our customers. When we finish a job, I ask the customer if they wouldn't mind posting a review for us. It seems to work; the calls we have received would likely not have found us otherwise. We're at the end of the alphabet if someone is doing a search.
From contributor K:
How much does Google ad words cost you? (I know this can vary a lot). Can you target only cities or regions you want to sell into. We are going to build a website this year to sell a furniture and custom related product. The competition does very well with this product. My daughter builds websites, so yet another new one will be in the works, we know next to nothing about online marketing.
From contributor W:
I use Yelp all the time to pick out good restaurants in Chicago! I never thought people searched it for things like woodworking, but that's an excellent idea. I'd recommend trying some e-newsletters with your postcards (start collecting customer email addresses) and see which works best.
From contributor S:
Adwords cost as much as your budget allows you. You can set it to any amount of dollars per month limit, and any amount of dollars or cents per hit. The higher your "per hit" rate is the better your chances are that your site will show up on Adwords column. I have it set to 50 cent per hit with $150 per month budget. I'm not sure about targeting particular areas, but I know it appears in your local area. Search engine is designed the way that it pulls requests from computers that are located in your area. When you sign up you will see that it is very easy to use and manage your account. You also can plant a small code provided by Google in to your website's HTML code and it helps to improve exposure of your site. You also can monitor how many hits you had per day and where hits came from. It is great marketing tool at very low cost.
From contributor L:
Post cards are good. We mail out 1,000 per day with a very good return. We also have e-mail that sends out a hundred thousand per day.
