Increasing Customer Spend With A Little Social Media Help

Postcardmania reached out to me recently to tell me of a social media case study of their own that generated $120,637 in sales. Case studies with metrics are hard to come by — everyone wants to tell me what they’re about to do. Very few want to tell me what they did. So, I started asking questions.

It turns out that Postcardmania, which is a full-service marketing company, but one that certainly has a direct mail bend, came up with a nice case study on increasing current customer spend. It’s not altogether a social media case study, but what they did is worth noting because social media can at least get an assist here. Here’s what they did:

For Valentine’s Day, the company sent 500 current or former customers (not prospects) a care package that included a Valentine’s Card, wax lips and a wax mustache. The card asked them to put the lips and mustache on and take a picture of themselves, post the picture to Postcardmania’s Facebook page and in return, they’d get a free copy of the Postcardmana CEO Joy Gendusa’s book about postcard marketing.

I went back and looked and it only seems that three or four customers actually posted pictures. The company reported just 20 new likes on Facebook (on a page the has over 4,100). But within a week of sending the packages, 68 customers order over $120,000 worth of marketing services.

If I had to guess, social media didn’t drive this business. But the company used a combination of thought leadership (the book), current events (Valentine’s Day), its relationship with customers established through previous work and social media (a little fun with the mustache and lips rather than just sending a card) to remind them they might need to order something.

You can slice and dice the stats a dozen ways. Honestly, 68 orders out of 500 packages isn’t an awesome conversion rate in some industries, though it might be in Postcardmania’s. The social media metrics aren’t overwhelming, either. But $120K is $120K and if sending this little Facebook gimmick invite spurred it, how can you complain?

The point here is that you can combine your social media efforts and some activation for your customers with a little off-line reminder that might just drive more business. Even if the point isn’t to do so.

Do you have some similar stories of just reminding customers you’re there? Share them with us! The comments are yours.

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