Does "cost effective advertisting" exist?

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Dear Heather,

My spa is three years old and I'm still establishing myself in the marketplace. I currently do 6" x 8" postcard mailings to 25,000 households every 3 months along with monthly email blasts. What other cost effective forms of advertising would you recommend?

David

Dermage Aesthetic Center & Spa
Danbury, CT

David,

You are already doing two of my favorite outbound marketing activities, but I don't think of either of them as advertising.   Email newsletters and direct mail postcards are relationship builders.  And sadly, advertising is rarely "cost effective."  In fact, all effective marketing should build a relationship with an existing or prospective client. 

Rather than "do" more, I would encourage you to shift what you are saying in your postcards and e-mails.  25,000 is a lot of contacts and if you can improve your response rate from the standard 2% (or 500) to 5% (or 1250) per mailing purely with a different message, then you can spend virtually the same but have significantly more clients.  If you aren't tracking your response rate, then your first step would be to design those postcards with the following in mind:

• Talk to your target client. If it doesn't directly speak to the needs of your ideal client than it may be to generic for clients to feel that your spa "knows" them.
• Have a call to action. Every marketing communication should have an objective for your client to take action: call for an appointment by a certain date, order a gift card by a certain date, refer a friend, attend an event, host a spa party, etc.  Including a date to take action will increase response, especially if you have a special bonus by taking action quickly.
• Include a customized 800 number that tracks all calls from the postcard mailing.  It will ring at your front desk, but you can view a report of how many calls came into that number specific to your postcards.  You can use the same one, or a new one, for your e-mail newsletters as well -- depending on how specific you want to be about tracking how clients are motivated to call you.

And to broadly answer your question about other activities to consider, I would first recommend creating an annual marketing strategy that ties together all your marketing activities such as your website, Internet marketing, email newsletters, postcards, events, in-spa marketing and publicity.

Comments

[manda]

hey,
i mentioned this before, but i strongly recommend doing some custom t-shirt work. sparkle-plenty.com does it with swarovsky crystals, and my staff and clients love them! i did post cards too, and i did not find them to be terribly cost-effective. t-shirts are pricier, but they get results, and isn't that the point?

xo
m