What do you guys thinks works better? Post cards or valpaks? Do you know any other names for valpaks at there? (other companies)
Here we have Valpak and MoneyMailer
I haven’t tried Valpak yet, but direct mail likely has a better ROI because it’s an offer standing alone… or at the very least, not literally on top of 40 other offers.
But Valpak is consistent… I can think of 4 or 5 companies I see in there every month and if I needed their services (two of the ones I remember would be a garage door company, and an air duct cleaning co) I’d likely use them first as soon as the next valpak came in. It all comes down to cost… what’s the Valpak run? $1500/mo or something?
I hired a carpet cleaner about 6 years ago from a Val-Pak or something
like it . I was talking to him about his results advertising in it and he
told me they were doing about $15k a month, just from the coupon!
Being our service is similar in nature, perhaps similar results are
possible.
By the way, that was the best carpet cleaner I ever used. Sadly he
never kept in contact and I forgot the name of his business. If he
is doing that with all of those other customers, he could be losing
as many as he gains. Important lesson there.
People will remember the results, but not always the name.
Keep in contact.
I did a couple of Valpaks and they bombed hard - When I get one @ my house I just cruise through and grab the pizzas coupons. The beauty of Direct mail is people are forced to look @ it. (sorta)
We use Valpak and it works great. I think both have their benefits. Our Valpak coupon goes out to 100,000 homes every single month. The benefit to sending out postcards, is that the customer has more of a chance seeing it since it stands alone. The downside is it’s more expensive to get that postcard mailer to 100,000 homes than a Valpak coupon. So, for the same expense as a valpak coupon to 100,000 homes, you may only be able to send a postcard to 15,000 homes. That’s just an example of course.
Ballpark…what does it cost to Valpak 100,000 homes?
approximately 2 to 3000 per month.
Considering direct mail would easily run $30k for the same numbers, that’s not bad at all…
Does it produce $20-$30K/month in business?
Just asking because we try to keep marketing budget to 10% of gross.
You have to think of the long term with marketing as well as the short term. You may have one customer for the next 30 years or so that you obtained from Valpak. If it’s a 400 dollar customer, in ten years if they get cleaned once a year that’s 4000 bucks from that one customer. I have several ways of marketing my business. Valpak is one of them and it’s well worth it in my eyes. I would try to talk whatever company your going to use down to their absolute lowest price. They will all negotiate. The more service areas you purchase, the more negotiating power you get. Also, it takes several months to really get going on the coupons. The first month was just mediocre for us. We’ve been advertising in there for over a year now and our logo and name is branded in peoples minds now.
I’d like to go a little deeper if that’s okay…
What is the response rate in terms of calls inquiring about your services?
How many jobs do you actually do as a result of these calls?
What is the ROI on the $3K you’re spending?
Thanks.
I understand the long term value. However, at some point, you have to be keeping marketing budget to a set percentage. In the end, if you are spending that same 2-3000/month on that form of advertising for the next 10 years, it still needs to produce 20-30k/month. Otherwise, you will just be trading dollars for the first few years and not seeing a ROI until it is too late.
My question was to see if it produces 10:1 return. If it does not, then what is it? If it is 5:1, then it could still be viable if another form of marketing is performing better and your AVERAGE is still 10:1 across the board. We do some forms of marketing that completely BLOW but due to others showing 40:1 return, we are still able to stay at our 10:1 overall return.
Make sense? I hate typing. LOL
Just wondering what your return is. We are always looking for methods the perform well. Tired of the forms that only trade dollars where the advertiser is the only one making money.
I’m not going to get into dollars and cents but we received 32 prospects from Valpak for the month of June. I’m not trying to say Valpak is better than postcards, but if your working with a limited budget, Valpak may be a good option for you. Of course you still have to build the coupon correctly to get the best return. I think in the future when my business grows a little more and we have more revenue coming in, we will start sending post cards.
32 phone calls from 100,000 Valpak pieces??? It’s paying for itself, but that seems like a low response rate to me…if correct, that kinda confirms my suspicions about Valpak. I’ll bet you could spend the same $3,000 on door hangers and do waaaay better. Have you tracked your results from hangers?
I’m not going to hang that many door hangers or try to pay someone to do it because half of them will end up in the trash. It’s just not practical. You go hang that many door hangers and then talk to me. Also, I don’t pay 3000 dollars. I pay 1200 a month because we do trade with them. The retail value is 3000 but if you pay that your shorting yourself. You should easily be able to talk them down to 2500 or 2000 for 100,000 mailers. There is also the fact that your branding your company each time someone looks at your coupon. Some customers won’t call you until they see your coupon several times.
FORGET PERCENTAGES! Too many of us treat marketing as a contest. This is not American Idle- it doesn’t
take the most votes to win.
Do any of you realize how hard it is to bring in 32 customers in a month? If I were Kurt I would keep running
that ad in conjunction with postcards, fliers or door hangers. That’s saturation marketing and NOTHING works
better.
Kurt- ‘branding’ does not quite work that way. Because I have seen your coupon many times does not talk
me into buying from you UNLESS there is no other discernible options. That is a hard way to win.
I would pay $1200 for 32 new customers, as many times as I could.
384 customers in a year from one source of advertising… we’d be craxy to pass that up. However,
his results will not be everyones results. I am sure many don’t get any calls.
It’s worth testing out
Paul-
I agree with your points…however, Kurt said (I think) that he’s spending $3,000 per month on Valpak, so that’s $100 per new customer…still profitable, but I simply wondered what other things he could spend that same $3,000 on
Randy, I spend 1200 a month on Valpak.
$1200 was his deal that was bartered some. Also, it was 32 PROSPECTS. Depending on closing ratio, that is good or bad. For my company, $1200 for 32 actual paying jobs would be right on target. Typical job is $350-$400. So 32 jobs at a cost of $37.50/job is keeping my marketing budget really close to the 10% mark.
But with a good 70% close rate, only getting 22 jobs out of 32 leads increases the marketing cost to $53/job which exceeds budget percentage(or meet percentage goal by raising prices to $530/job).
Percentages HAVE to be looked at or you will quickly get false sense of success and later learn that you have cut into profit, salary or savings to stay afloat.
I only asked for performance stats just to help myself and other readers here to determine whether Valpak is an EFFECTIVE lead producer. Based on MY numbers, it would only workout when averaged with better lead producers. While at the same time, a company with higher ticket price service or item might love those result numbers. A company selling $20,000 room additions would enjoy getting only one job per mailing. He has a higher marketing budget even though it is same percentage of gross as ours is.
Thanks for the clarification. In post #7 of this thread you wrote:
approximately 2 to 3000 per month.
You subsequently revealed a reduced expense due to bartering.
HOWEVER, given that others may not be able to negotiate that arrangement in their locales, the $3,000/100,000 is still a relevant number for purposes of this discussion.
You’ve done well, of course. 
