Our company has had to make that 2020 pivot. If you don’t know what I am talking about let me tell you a little about 2020. This year we had the COVID-19 Pandemic and our entire economy went nuts. The majority of states went on a house arrest lockdown and shut down all non-essential workers from working. Yes, it sounds a lot like communism just happened and well it did. But this is more about how our company survived the freedom sucking economy collapsing event. We decided to use our own ingenuity and purchased a bunch of packaging supplies and took all of our own marketing in house. We decided to instead of pay thousands of dollars for a marketing company to do work that we know cost about half that we would instead do it in house.
Our first task was to go through all the numbers. We had to track all the purchases and sales that were made from previous marketing and find out what was actually making us the most money because we have to be fragile and fast in this market. Our goal was to hunt marketing out like a panther and that is what we did. We researched hard on what was landing us our money and pounced on it. It turns out that our packaging supplies idea was right and that direct mail was the answer.
our most popular and money-making marketing item was a direct mail campaign. There was no point in spending money on anything but this and well emails. It is easy to follow up on the direct mailers with emails in order to give the 1 two punch to make our marketing work. So with this in mind, we had to find a way to make our company capable of doing direct mailers. Most of us are technologically savy so we figured we could write out our letters and then put them into a nice looking format.
Formatting turned out to be a hard part because of looks matter. We wanted to make sure these looked professional because even if we did them cheap if they look cheap they won’t work. Perception really is a reality so we decided to step up our game. We used color copies for our letters and had the look of it to be very professional and branded. Then we had to go ahead and buy a bunch of good looking letters. Buying letters, paper, and inc for this project was part of the expense.
We tracked every single cost, from letters, labels, stamps, and paper. Then we put on a special sauce wax seal to finish off the letters. By the time we finished, we found out that the cost of each one was about 1 dollar when done in mass production. We had to call up big companies and order all of our items in bulk in order to cut down on costs. Going to Amazon was not going to work for costs if we are going to make money doing this. So the next part was to get our team together to make these happen.
We ended up taking shifts each week and spending a three-hour shift to accomplish all the letters we would need for the week. Everyone pitched in, even our CEO and we all have had a good time doing this on our own.