BSSK

The Life & Times of an Event Promoter

Advertising Part Two……………..  Flyer by post.

When discussing marketing with others, they often roll their eyes at the fact that I still use ‘snail mail’ and religiously send out between 2,500 and 8,000 envelopes depending on show, to individual addresses.  ‘Why would you pay all that out in printing and postage in these days of internet and e-mail?’  they ask.

There is a VERY good reason for it – it works and e-mail does not!

As mentioned in the last article, I am a statistics junkie having worked in marketing and sales for most of my working life.  In order to judge how effective our advertising is and what works, we operate the Prize Draw at every show, with a questionnaire attached.  This gives us our marketing information and over many years, we have identified very effectively, what works. 

This is updated as new fashions arrive and gives us very effective feedback on what works and what does not.

This paragraph is repeating myself from last time, but is worth repeating for those that did not see the last article.  We count the number of cards per show to find out what percentage of the visitors filled one in.  It is always over 60%, but most often in the 70 – 80% bracket!  Surprisingly high!  Of those filled in, some will ignore the question and some will tick multiple choices.  This and the missing 20 – 30% means it is not an exact science, but overall, we get a good indication from these cards by applying the same split to the remaining numbers – after all, it is highly unlikely that the whole of the missing cards came because of one means of advertising.

Going back years and without exception, between 80 -95% of the cards completed fall into two categories.  These are ‘flyer by post’ and ‘word of mouth’.  The other 5-20% is made up of everything else!  The two categories are pretty near equal too – if flyer by post gets 720 hits, you can be sure word of mouth will be getting somewhere between 670 and 750!  It runs that close every time, on smaller or larger door figures! 

This means that no matter what the cost, we simply must keep posting out our showguide to the visitor database for every show!

In the last three years, we have tried targeted experiments at replacing this by e-mail and can report it simply does not work!  My e-mail stats show that of 12,000+ e-mails sent out for Manchester, less than 5% opened them, less than 1% actually clicked a link to the website, the talks or the exhibitor list.  What we don’t know is how many of that 1% then came to the show. 

By contrast, we sent out well over 8,000 envelopes for the same show with our 32 page showguide and of the cards filled in, 47% came because of that.  Another 42% came because of word of mouth and the next highest figure was 5% from brochure picked up in shop etc.  E-mail didn’t even reach 1%, nor did magazine or newspaper advertising or anything else we did.  They just made up the remaining 6% between them.

Our website gets lots of hits, but these are on the back of the postal guide being received.  We see the pattern – our mail forwarder collects the delivery on a 3 day service – 4 days later the website graph peaks and continues to spike for the next couple of weeks up to the show.

This is proof positive for me that people look at the flyer they receive and do not necessarily even bother to open an e-mail.

The postage bill with the mail forwarder is always over £1,500, but in some cases is over £3,000.  Manchester always came to over that, with Elsecar running close to the £3k figure.  On top of that there is the printing cost too.

I can see why people think I am mad, but when you consider a full page in ‘Soul and Spirit’ costs £2,000 + VAT and last time I did it, we got 10 ticks on the cards, I know which I think is the best value for money!

We still do the e-mails, but view them rather like a reminder for the flyer than the primary source of informing visitors.  We also put listings on every spiritual website we can find, such as ‘Spirit Guides’ and ‘Merlin’s Diary’ and all the other similar ones.  We rarely get any of these mentioned, probably less than 5 times in a whole year!  What does get response is our listings on ‘Stallfinder’, but these are exhibitors contacting us, not visitors.

One thing that breaks the mould is our listings on ‘The Healer Foundation’ website.  It is often second to Google in the rankings of ‘referring sites’, which are sites that people click through to our site from!

Hopefully this and the last article have shown some of the work and research that goes into getting the best return on money spent on advertising.  When someone says, ‘Why don’t you do X, Y or Z?’ there is probably a very good reason for it! 

Next issue…….  ‘Advertising – newspaper & magazine’