Get a Life! Makes a Splash

You'll remember reading about Lila and Lee and their store, Get A Life!, in the March issue of Gifts & Decorative Accessories. L & L had taken their daughters, Leah and Leticia into their gift business, and now they had the time to consider what had gone wrong with their previous ad campaigns.

They'd tried everything: newspaper ads (expensive and overlooked), direct mailings (tossed out with junk mail), bag stuffers (good for existing customers, but didn't bring in new business), mailed flyers (tossed out with the junk mail), yellow page ads (only good for branded merchandise), a newsletter (too time-consuming), ads in local charity and school programs (goodhearted, but achieved limited results), radio ads (hard to find a good station), and group mailings (hard to set quality levels for the whole group). Lila and Lee's promotion policy needed a lift.

Their goals were obvious. They wanted more business and bigger sales. They wanted customers who hadn't been in the store for a while to come back and buy something. And they wanted to mail something that would be opened, attract attention, and be read by their customers.

Get A Life! had one excellent asset at its disposal — a well maintained and up-to-date mailing list of all their customers.

Their discussion continued over a fantastic sushi feast at Beneath the Sea-She, a Japanese restaurant owned by their favorite chef.

"It comes down to this," said Lee. "Either we do a gorgeous hand-addressed mailer that looks like an invitation — with a real stamp so it looks personalized — or we figure out a way to create a reasonably priced postcard that people won't just toss in the wastebasket."

"I vote for the postcard," said Lila immediately. "If we do the invitation, we'll blow our whole budget in one shot, and still have to fold and stuff and stamp. I, for one, have folded, stuffed, and stamped my last mailing!"

"Gee, I guess I don't have to wait for you to speak your mind," murmured Lee.

It may sound as though Lila and Lee's decision was haphazard, but in fact they'd recently attended a mailing seminar and had learned a thing or two about mailings. A postcard that is 4"x6" or smaller can be mailed for 23¢, as opposed to 37¢ for first class mail.

In addition, a postcard has a better chance of being read because there's no need to open it. As with all mailings, clear, concise copy and good graphics are the key to postcard success. And repetition of message is a must. The seminar speaker had been very clear on that point. She said, "Repetition is essential to success in ads and mailings. People have to see something three to five times before they remember it. And the remembrance rate builds until they have seen it ten times. An ad or mailer is 25 percent more likely to be remembered if it is seen 12 times than if it is seen only six times."

"I think it takes a lot more than that," remarked Lee, "I caught myself watching a commercial on television the other night that I had seen maybe 25 times. All of a sudden I realized that I knew the commercial, but still had no idea what they were advertising!"

Lila and Lee decided to mail 4"x6" postcards in sharp apple green and black ink — one a month for 12 months. Each card featured one item in the store, and showed a photograph of Lila or Lee or one of their staff doing something interesting with it. The first photograph featured a new juice squeezer. It showed Leticia squeezing juice while sitting in the middle of a huge pile of lemons in front of the Get A Life! sign. Each postcard also offered a grab bag prize for anyone who brought the card into the store and made a purchase. (Lee and Lila had finally learned to track sales from their ad campaigns!) Their goal was to achieve a 5 percent response rate — 50 sales or inquiries for every 1,000 postcards they mailed.

Two of the other postcards were used to plump sales — The Summer Sale and the After Christmas sale. The photograph for the Christmas postcard showed Lila gift-wrapped in wrapping paper, wearing a hat decorated with on-sale ribbon.

Get a Life's promotion schedule went like this: One postcard went out for Valentine's Day, one each for Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Graduation (Dad & Grad), Halloween, and two for Christmas. Lila and Lee used the remaining four mailings to promote new products, special services, their Web site, and hot items. Each card had a photograph, the information about the item or event, and all the store information in neat block type.

We know what you're thinking. Did it work?

You bet it worked! The photographs were such fun that people began saving them. Teenagers came into the store with the photos on their books. Lila made a montage of all the photographs and put it on the wall behind the cash register. Sales from new and returning customers went up.

Lila and Lee knew they had a winner when customers began bringing photographs of themselves posing with merchandise they'd bought at Get A Life! Some even suggested that their photos be used in future mailings. Lila and Lee can save that for the next ad campaign.