Woodland
03-11-2011, 10:17 AM
I have a number of mailings that I would like to do this spring to get some new customers. I am a small operation, working in a fairly small market. My advertising has almost exclusively been word of mouth and direct mailings. This season I would like to expand my services to include landscape gardening and all-around landscape maintenance and get a few more lawn mowing accounts set up. I am looking to beef up my "steady income" as opposed to chasing the one time projects. To this end, I have printed up a post card that I want to mail out to the neighborhoods I am targeting. I am thinking of following this up with a printed letter a few weeks after. In addition to this mailing, I am going to send out some general brochures showing some of the "project" work I have done and listing all of the services I offer. This will be a much less selective mailing.
I am unsure about the timing of these mailing and was hoping to garner a bit of advice about what has worked for others. As of right now, there is still snow on the ground...a lot of snow. I predict we wont see patches of bare ground for at least another three weeks. It will definitely be mid to late April before I can even think about getting outside. My concern, obviously is that I don't want to waste any of these mailings by getting them to people when they aren't even close to thinking about their yards yet, but I also don't want to give them the opportunity to hire someone else before I get to them! The general services brochure I'm not as worried about. The first part of the season is always jam packed with spring cleanups for basically the same clientel I do every years. That mailing is geared more to gathering interest in installations - plant and hardscape - so once the grass is green and people are confident that winter is gone seems most appropriate. Maybe I'm wrong. What have your experiences been???
I am unsure about the timing of these mailing and was hoping to garner a bit of advice about what has worked for others. As of right now, there is still snow on the ground...a lot of snow. I predict we wont see patches of bare ground for at least another three weeks. It will definitely be mid to late April before I can even think about getting outside. My concern, obviously is that I don't want to waste any of these mailings by getting them to people when they aren't even close to thinking about their yards yet, but I also don't want to give them the opportunity to hire someone else before I get to them! The general services brochure I'm not as worried about. The first part of the season is always jam packed with spring cleanups for basically the same clientel I do every years. That mailing is geared more to gathering interest in installations - plant and hardscape - so once the grass is green and people are confident that winter is gone seems most appropriate. Maybe I'm wrong. What have your experiences been???