steven.vu

Direct marketing – a step by step guide to annoying thousands.

We’ve been plodding along with this business in its current form for about 8 months now. We’ve tried vfd regional newspapers, leaflets, google adsense and stalking. Some have been effective, some havn’t. Maybe one day i’ll number crunch our return on investment for each medium. Anyhow, our new shot at the big time.

Our business targets a specific demographic, namely; households with a child in Year 5.

Step 1.

Data

I first of all tried to get a copy of the 2002 Electoral Register (the last register with everyones address on) and a copy of the 2007 ER. This was going to be cross referenced with the Birth Death Marriage databases on offer to get all households with children born between a range of months.

1. Use the birth register to get a list of all children born between 09/97 to 08/98.
2. Use the mother/father field and search the marriage database to get their full name.
3. Get the 2007 ER and fill in the gaps with the 2007 ER.
4. Automate the task. Fucking hard.

192.com has the 2002 ER and the 2007 ER. Ancestry.com has the birth death and marriage database. Getting a hard copy of the data I can use locally however, proved to be a lot more tricky. Providing I got the data, I would then have to clean the data using the mailing preference list.

While it sounds a little long winded, it does actually work. Failing to automate the task – I gave up.
If anyone believes they can help, get in contact. We’ll be rich.

Along the way I discovered how easy credit card fraud is, but i’ll leave that to another time.

Getting a mailing list isn’t much of a bother. Call up a dozen mailing list companies and get some quotes. Ours were in the region of £60 per 1000 addresses to £200 per 1000 addresses. After much research, we decided to waste our money on the most expensive at £200 per thousand and some delivery costs. 30 fucking pounds to email over a tiny file?

Mailing list companies can be placed into two categories. Those that compile the data and those that buy the data wholesale and sell it at margin. They’ll all however, say they’re the former.

mailing list accuracy

All mailing lists have a major flaw. The data is usually collected via questionnaires, surveys, scam prize draws. Therefore, any data actually gathered is usually from a muppet. Someone who most probably isn’t interested in a luxury product. Time will tell whether i’m wrong.

Step 2.

Making the brochure.

I bought roughly £70 of pictures on istock.com and settled on a swatch. I then opened up Indesign and set up a strict 6 column grid layout. I then went to lynda.com and watched a 15hr tutorial video on indesign. I watched it nonstop. After becoming proficient at Indesign I set about designing. It took about 20hrs.

Step 3.

Printing

The brochure was printed:

5,000 16pp (216mm x 279.5mm) landscape

made up of:

4pp (216mm x 279.5mm) cover printed on 250gsm 9 lives

12pp (216mm x 279.5mm) pages printed on 100gsm 9 lives

Crease cover, fold, stitch & trim.

If you understand the above and arn’t in the print design industry then I feel sorry for you. The brochures were printed on 100% recycled paper and are US Letter in size.

Step 4.

Mail Fulfillment

The royal mail have a dozen different ways of posting something. It’ll drastically reduce your cost of mailing a large quantity. We decided to not bother and pay full whack.

The full cheap ass 3rd class mailsort rate would have cost £800 ~ for 4000 large letter 100g envelopes. The standard rate is £1680.

The reason why is because to get that discount you need to spend over £5000 with good ol consignia a year. You can opt to go with a mailing house but they’ll charge you £600 to insert and print your letterheads. To make it as un junk mail as possible all letterheads are hand signed and stamped instead of a scanned signature and franked or a PPI (postage paid impression).

That picture shows 500 brochures. It took 5 hours. When everything is fully bagged up, it’ll weigh 700kg.

Fucking schizo.

He’s gone bloody crazy today. For the last three weeks i’ve been working for a wanker. Not only for no pay, but for no thanks. All he’s made us do, is to complete all the work he needed from us and told us to fuck off. I guess he’s under a lot of pressure anyway.

Everything in life is a lesson however. Graham and I have learn’t the ins and outs of imports and exports which we would have never had the chance nor motivation for before. We’re trying to raise some capital to start another idea. It looks promising.

Good bye; SAD’s (C88′s), DANS, Commodity codes, C1200, C1201, C1202, B/l’s, L/C’s.

I Love You

This is my friend Amy Clarke, she’s uber cool.

I’m not so cool. If anyone thinks they’re cool, they can send over some pictures and i’ll put them up.

Telewest is screwing around with me. I can surf the internet for a good 5 minutes before the connection is lost. apparently this happens:

2006-07-24 22:37:18	warning	Cable Lost FEC lock
2006-07-24 22:37:18	critical	SYNC Timing Synchronization failure – Loss of Sync
2006-07-24 22:37:17	critical	SYNC Timing Synchronization failure – Loss of Sync
2006-07-24 22:37:17	critical	SYNC Timing Synchronization failure – Failed to acquire FEC framing

If anyone can make heads or tails of it then that’d be nice.

Our second class went swimmingly. Here’s a picture of the kids having fun.

and here’s me and Graham looking very smart.

I’ll leave it there, just in case my internet decides to fuck up.

New Business

Test Teach Tuition

 I'm setting up an 11+ tuition service in Wimbledon with Graham. 

Steve and Max’s – “The Meat’s on the Grill, papa”

Sitting in the pub with not enough money to buy a pint is depressing. After scrounging a pint off a girl we decided to start a business. And so it is, without a license, selling burgers on the cheap:

Update: The selling will commence on Thursday proper. After an abysmal dry run using plastic burgers and an inflatable bbq in Canbury, it was decided that fine weather was essential for this buisiness to work. I do not have big feet.

Entrepreneurs

So me and my ginger friend Graham meet for some games of pool. All is well until we talk about business. It’s what we mostly talk about, and never do anything about. We’ve had many ideas but most don’t get off the ground or we’re to lazy to follow through. Like the magazine, or the gig, or the stocks or educating some spoilt brats.

6 months ago we finally got off our arses and decided to start a small business, first we needed to open a business account. Being 17, this is harder said than done. Apparently you have to be 18 to have a legally binding contract such as a partnership agreement. So off we troddled to another bank which said you wouldn’t need a partnership agreement if it was a private business.

We sign up, they get our identification lost. Two months later and we finally get our account, CHE MEDIA. Problem is no business cash cards, possibly the coolest thing to obtain when your 17 and probably one of the main reasons for opening an account in the first place. How so? because you can use it as ID, not many people below 18 have a business after all, maybe they’d accept it to rent a car and there’s always that £500 overdraft.

You’d assume once we had our business account open we’d set up the business up and get cracking. Not so. The thing i’ve learnt is we’re mostly all talk, big plans to take over the world, but nothing ever works out.

Here’s Graham, he’s notorious around Kingston and Surbiton for being a bit of a stalker and paedophile. He’s harmless really, but everyone assumes the worst. I’m guessing this picture doesn’t help. He’s getting a balloon animal for this girl he likes at work, the 40yr old clown gives it to him reluctantly. This is juxtaposed next to the 3 year old crying his eyes out, apparently “he can’t have one, insurance dear,” the clown says to the lil kids mother, just as my friend walks past with his balloon animal

I’m off to meet Dave, Mike, Ben and Vicky to go to Hari DS Birthday do at her house. Matko and Graham arn’t coming, she hates them. Makes it hilariously funny when trying to organise something. He’s got work anyway, he’ll be tired.