Towards the end of last week we put our home up for sale with a local estate agency. This week in the post I received a postcard from a transport company that specialises in removals. The card had details of their services and offered me a free estimate if I called or visited their website.
From a marketing point of view it was good to see a Irish company proactively marketing to its target base of prospects. Indeed people selling up a property and moving are going to be hot leads for a removal firm. I thought that the postcard was well designed and a good attention grabber. Compared with the usual humdrum mail it stood out from the crowd.
In terms of getting the prospect to take action I thought the postcard could have been better, really all it says is visit our website or call for a free estimate. The offer of a free estimate is a bit of a cop out in my mind and is not a strong call to action. It is not like a company is going to charge you to tell you their prices now is it?
The biggest failing of this campaign is that the postcard was directing people to the Libratrans website, whilst in principal this can be a good idea when marketing with postcards in this instance it was not effective. The website looked dated and there were a number of errors on the page. The final nail in the coffin was that the quotation request form was not working at all. I wonder how many lost leads this has cost them?
What other things could Libratrans have done to make this campaign more effective? Perhps the campaign could have been strengthened by offering a free incentive for prospects to get in touch. On their website they currently offer a checklist to prospects of things to remember when packing up the contents of a house. The content of this checklist could be reworked into a report and offered for free when prospects fill out a form on the website.
To make the offer even more appealing giving away something else of high perceived value and that would have been very useful to their target audience might have been even better. For example how about if they had offered 3 free packing boxes worth €10? This would make people even more responsive as they would be thinking that is a good deal I think I’ll get in touch. Whatever was decided Libratrans would need to test various other combinations of offer to see what got the best response.
Overall this campaign is a good way of generating leads from a targeted audience. I was wondering how they compile the list of people moving. One way might be to keep an eye on the new properties as they are listed on Irish property websites, or perhaps it is possible to purchase lists of all the new properties. Another way that they might do it is by getting the drivers of their trucks to record details of all the new properties for sale that they come across in their area.
This is a very good example of a simple yet effective marketing campaign, it can certainly be improved but it is a good start. When you think that a potential client is going to be worth €1000 to them the cost of sending out a postcard to say 100 prospects for a 1% response rate could produce a healthy flow of business.
