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.