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.
Libratrans deserve a pat on the back for actually implementing a direct mail campaign to a well defined target audience, that of people selling a home and moving and therefore most likely to need the services of a removal firm. The full colour postcard they sent is well designed and caught my attention straight away. Generally I find that in amongst all the other daily mail a postcard tends to stand out.
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.
An even stronger offer might have been to offer something of practical use to people moving house, like 3 free packaging flat pack boxes. Again this would have helped to focus in and identify people who are in need of the service. It would also facilitate contact between the company and the prospect and pain them in a good light. The cost to do this would be fairly low and I