So I was pretty excited to go to Vista Print and come up with a grand total of $250-$260 for creating, printing, and mailing my computer repair postcards to 250 local businesses with all of the work being done for me. I was talking to a friend that does graphic design and says VistaPrint has terrible print quality. Yet, they're one of the few sites I see that does the all-in-one package of printing and mailing them for you (along with to a mailing list of businesses of your choosing). I have a graphic designer working on the postcards now, but am discouraged to hear that my next step (which was going to be at VistaPrint) was not going to be as simple as I'd thought. If VistaPrint does indeed suck, what other options do I have out there? Ideally, I'd love a reasonably priced printing company that will print and ship my postcards out for me, but that doesn't have awful print quality and preferably above average turn-around time. If it comes to getting a mailing list and supplying a given printing company with that, that's fine too. Help me Clutchfans. The headaches of getting a small-business off the ground
I dunno, plus 1 dollar per postcard seems like a bad investment to me. I don't see how you can get a return on that investment that would warrant that kind of dough.
If I get a decent portion of calls , it automatically pays itself back. I'm charging around $30-$45 for each service. Compared to other websites, the prices just keep going and going up even more. It'd be like $2-3 per card.
If possible I would fork out atleast 4k to do blast marketing through direct mail advert agencies. You could reach like 10k homes/businesses with that. 1 dollar per just seems way too high for a low margin return, esp if many of the business you will reach with that 250-rate plan might have dedicated computer repair peeps!
I have a budget of about $500, total. I know it's low, but this is to get a home-based business off the ground. If I start getting more and more calls, I'll spend more. In the meantime, I won't have $4,000 probably for the foreseeable future.
Take that 500 dollars and get 10,000 flyers and rig them with rubber bands and go walk an apartment complex or a subdivision. A fancy postcard doesn't mean a thing it gets thrown away with the other junk mail. I can already tell you that the more upscale subdivisions would be your target who might be interested in the service, but you are going about it the wrong way.
Quality is going to be the issue. With design, printing, the mailing list. Lots of people do this, but not for bargain basement pricing. YOu get what you pay for, generally. $500 isn't a lot of money, when you consider the time and responsibility of the job. I don't know what kind of list/design/print you got, but you probably got what you paid for. What I can tell you is that with a program like this, if things are done well/right (list design and print) you should/can generally expect certain response rate. There are ways to increase and decrease that, all of them involve money. I assume that your $260 quote included postage. If not, add that as part of your cost of the program. Just a touchpoint, with a program like this, an acceptable result would be 2-4 serious responses. I don't know "Vistaprint" but I would say now to remember the old adage, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Ask to see some samples, ask them what a typical response rate is for this, and make the decision.
I've gotten cards through them before. They're fine. Your friend is a graphic artist. It's his job- of course he's going to nitpick the minute details. Most people think that stock car X is nice, except car guys, who pick it apart.
