I’m currently working on our first Direct Mail campaign. This is something new for me and our company. We have never really engaged in any type of traditional advertising. Our business has been built on word of mouth referrals and relationships with realtors. As of nearly 4 years ago, I can add relationships with builders as a growth tool to the mix. Our marketing budget just isn’t large enough to get results from ongoing radio or TV advertising. One baby step into traditional advertising is direct mail.

So, we’re jumping in and we’re going to try a full flegded direct mail campaign.

I’m still in the research & development stages, but ultimately our direct mail campaign will be developed to communicate these three things..

• What Make makes All-American different than our competitors
• Why you should choose green termite protection and pest control services for your home & family
• A Call to action!

What I’m pondering now… is there a greener way to effectively get the same results as a paper, junk mail piece? There are services like Green Dimes available to the public to help stop people like me from sending you this kind of advertisement. ummm.

Gavin and I have made commitments to make choices to live greener. And, we do our part at All-American to reuse & recycle along with provide environmentally friendly services. How much impact does a direct mail program like this have on the environment?

I was speaking with a friend at a printing and direct mail company. As we were discussing mail service procedures & protocols (a very engaging and inspiring conversation, I might add … he mentioned that some environmental groups are now trying to develop a “do not mail” list. This makes sense to me, but his hesitancy to all this (and remember this is he livelihood) is that it is all the junk mail that we get that offsets the cost of the U.S. Postal Service. Without junk mail… our postage rates could sky-rocket to a dollar or more- that would be a lot of money for a consumer and from a business perspective a raise in postal costs like this could be a nightmare.

So, I’m still pondering… pondering the message that we’ll give in our copy & visuals… and also the message we’ll send by sending an unsolicited paper piece.

We’re by no means a large corporate giant… we’re talking 8,000 peices max. So we’ll see…