I have to admit, when I first heard about this week’s tip in the Summer of 2010 I was skeptical. I mean, really, how many people keep stuff they get in the mail?
Turns out, quite a few. Direct mail advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. It wouldn’t be that way if everyone chucked their mail – we have to look at everything to make sure we aren’t throwing something important away.
It works and if that fact isn’t enough to sway you, then how about our experience marketing Tracie as a dental hygienist looking for work.
Case Study
Tracie was going to be ending a nice three-month temping assignment through Doctors Staffing in Salt Lake City for a hygienist on maternity leave. Tracie still had nothing lined up after that.
One day I was talking to a friend who was handling some mailings for me at work and I was telling him about my wife looking for a full-time. He said, “you should send a post.” I just kinda laughed it off but after a bit it started making more and more sense.
Tracie was starting to lose some steam delivering her resume “door-to-door” at offices so she was open to anything that would save her from doing so much of that.
That week I designed a couple postcards in the smaller format/size so that the postage was cheapest. I included her picture, a catchy little line to grab attention, some bullet points on what she had to offer and several ways to contact or learn more about her.
We put together a mailing list of dental practices that were within 10 miles of our house from local online directories – hire someone from elance.com to do this for you if it takes too much of your time. It turned out in our case there were just over 100 offices.
We found an online printer that would print 100 post cards for about $18 (Vistaprint.com). It took about 10 days to get them back, so in the meantime we finished the mailing list and created labels.
I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of what came back and with how fast they came (we paid for 14-day shipping). So I can’t say enough about the quality and pricing of Vistaprint (nope they aren’t paying me to say that).
So, we slapped the labels and stamps on (postage was about $32 on postcards at the time), tossed them into the mail, and held our breath over the weekend.
The Results
By Tuesday morning, Tracie received a call for a job interview! The next day, she got a call for a temping assignment. The following week, two more temping assignments and about three weeks after we mailed them, she got a call for another job interview.
Success? You tell me – we spent $50 and she made about $500 from temping, had two interviews and two more temping jobs lined up for a month later. So we decided to send another one about seven weeks later. We repeated the process, and she got one more interview and about four or five temping days.
This third job interview turned out to be “the one” though and she was hired and still works there today. One of the remarkable things was that all three job interviews were for positions that went un-advertised (at least in the places Tracie was checking).
In the months that followed offices continued to call, and as far away as a year later she received a call for temping – there is no question, some offices keep those postcards.
If you haven’t thought about a postcard, give it a shot.
Bonus Tip: Our job hunting store offers a bunch of awesome postcard templates that will grab attention and the spread the word quickly that you are awesome.
