Have you ever had a major ministry launch or event that needed to get out into your community? You may have printed thousands of invite cards, hung posters all over town or even used radio advertising. In very specific situations you may want to consider the very powerful tool of direct mail.
A couple of years ago a colleague – Alex Mclean and I began experimenting with direct mail for our k-12 school. Since then Alex does all the creative design and I do the metrics/list building/financial side of our marketing. I had recently attended a direct marketing luncheon for businesses and was introduced to a 3rd party direct mail partner – Modern Postcard. We now had everything we needed to begin experimenting.
Today you can work with a 3rd party company like Modern Postcard and drill down on just about any metric you desire. For our school we work with households with specific ages of children. With private school tuition being pretty significant, we only need our direct mail to produce a couple enrollments and the program is profitable for us. A typical 8000 piece oversize full color postcard would run us around 4500.00 (including list, printing and mail distribution).
But what about church? We wanted to do more with church via direct mail but found it hard to justify the expense being you couldn’t see a direct correlation on how it would get paid for. We all want to invest in kingdom building work and are willing to spend to do that, but sometimes cutting a check for 4,000.00 in the name of “kingdom building” gets a little tough when you come right down to it.
But then……we had a unique request. Our Celebrate Recovery program had an open house coming and had 1000.00 they were willing to spend to do community promotion. We set out to design a smaller, full color postcard and narrowed our list by limiting to one zip code. We chose to stick with our basic “families with children” list and ended up with a 4000 piece mailer. All in – printing, preparation and mailing cost us just over our 1000.00 budget.
Normally our CR program runs about 100 people, but that particularly night they had a 50% increase in visitors. Many of the visitors had their card in their hand when they arrived. Although, financially there is no payback from a ministry, we felt that 50 new people finding this free program as an introduction to the healing work of Jesus Christ was money well spent.
After this very successful scaled down direct mail promotion, we anticipate doing more of these kinds of highly targeted campaigns. Below is the front and back of the post cards we sent.
Click on images to enlarge for detail
What have you tried via direct mail?
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