One of the small business that I worked with was setting up as a small pizza delivery service. They didn’t see any reason why they needed direct mailing lists. Their strategy was basically to canvass various neighborhoods with coupons, fliers, and other advertisements for their service. They made their own direct marketing lists – it was pretty obvious who would buy what they were selling. It was a college town so they canvassed the student neighborhoods. Fast forward to six months later — business had not picked up so they had to reconsider their strategies. What they were doing didn’t seem to work.

They didn’t think that their direct mail lists were the problem. They hit different student neighborhoods every month, so one way or another they should have been getting everyone. The problem was that they were using so much money printing up thousands and thousands of fliers that they were not making enough on pizza sales to cover expenses. Finally, they hit a wall. They knew that they had to hire a direct marketing company to boost sales or they would go under within 18 months.

I was pleased to find out that their direct marketing lists were not the problem. The company that they hired, in fact, advocated expanding their turf even further. They came up with a novel solution: rather than using direct marketing lists with targeted advertisements to try to nail just the right customers, they wanted to take coupon books door-to-door and try to sell them off as a way of getting more business in the pizza joint. At that point, they were willing to try anything. I had expected them to use scientifically targeted direct marketing lists, but they were open for any new strategy. As long as it was something that they hadn’t tried before, it might be worth a shot.

It turned out to be the best thing that they had tried! People throw out free coupons all the time, but if you have good salesman selling a coupon book at the door, people will do their best to use every coupon up on your product. It’s just human nature. People value more the things that they had to pay for, including coupon books. At the prices they were selling pizzas, they would not make much money off of each new customer, but it didn’t really matter – there were so many new people coming in that they didn’t know what to do with them! It turns out that direct marketing lists aren’t the solution in this case. Good door-to-door salesman were. Sometimes you have to think out of the box when it comes to advertising your business.