E-Commerce

Hello, I’m Josh, one of the co-founders and my online fence company (yard fencing for around pools, to keep kids and dogs in the yard, etc.) is going to be the case study for today.  That’s because it is where the idea for RADMARC was born.  You see I’ve been in the fencing business for about 20 years and I have run my own e-commerce company selling fencing for the past 12.  Through all these years our PPC spend via Google has sky-rocketed to six figures and the per click charge has more than doubled. 

In or around 2014 I was sitting in my office with Matt, the other founder and we were talking about ways to reach more customers and I had mentioned that we always have neighbors of our customers that see our fencing and then call to inquire and purchase. 

Matt said “jeez if you could just reach those neighbors, that would be the ticket!”. 

So I was like “we could send them a postcard?”.  “But that is a lot of work, I’d have to have someone design one, then gather the addresses, then label them, put a stamp on them, mail them.. ugggg”, “that’s horrible”.  “It will cost me like a buck a piece and 3 hours”.

Matt: “yeah you can’t be doing that, but maybe your office admin can? 😀

So I say “well I don’t know if it will have an ROI on what I pay her”, “but if there was a way to automate the process that would be ideal”, “like an app where I could choose my ideal customer like Facebook and an address and then advertise to those neighbors”.

In typical Matt fashion he says “I think I could build that!”.

And that is how RADMARC came about.  Over the next year we found data providers, made connections with printers and built out the technology to slice and dice demographic filters as well as pull a number of homes from an anchor address rather than all the homes within a radius (what everyone else does).

The final iteration for my fence company looked like this:

1. RADMARC is connected to our order processing system called Magento and it pulls over orders every Friday at 5pm.

2. Once the orders are over into RADMARC it filters out any orders that have been sent to before and any orders that are newer than 90 days. We want the order to be “seasoned” for 90 days because that is the timeframe it normally takes for the customer to install the order.

3. We then filter out any orders that are less than $2,000 since we want to advertise to neighbors of “good” size jobs as well as any commercial addresses because we want to hit DIY customers.

4. Finally we take addresses we have left called anchor addresses and query our data partners to find the closest 100 neighbor’s addresses that meet the following criteria (our ideal customer profile):

1. Homeowners NOT renters.
2. Home values over $200,000 but less than $850,000.
3. Home size greater than 2000 sq. ft., but less than 6000 sq. ft.
4. Lot size greater than ¼ acre.
5. Homes with kids and/or dog.

5. The results are the mailing list and we are ready to dynamically create the postcard artwork. When we do this we have a dynamic field for [street name] so each postcard is unique and says for example, “your neighbor over on [Ravenna St.] just installed one of our fences..”.  This drives our engagement through the roof because they recognize the street and will drive by and look at the project.  They may even know the neighbor and strike up a conversation!

6. The order is then sent to the printer and mailed First Class Mail.

That’s it.  This is fully automated.  It has been setup for 5 years with just a few tweaks here and there and has delivered amazing results.  I also couple this with Facebook Remarketing so if someone that receives a postcard visits our website, then they will also see ads when visiting Facebook.  Great one two punch!

If you have an e-commerce website and think direct mail and postcard advertising would be a great compliment to your other advertising efforts, I’d love to help.  Getting creative when it comes to solutions involving our tech is what I do!

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