Making sure the right people get your brochure in their hands is one of the most important aspects of the brochure production and distribution process. This becomes even more important when you are targeting a specific type of programming, like summer camps. The kids/parents that are signing up for summer camps are normally not the same types of customer that is signing up for general enrichment or professional education courses throughout the year, so why distribute your brochure to them in the same fashion? Below are some summer camp brochure distribution tips:
Use a Summer Camp Best Customers List
For any brochure mailing, we recommend always using a best customers/past customers list and then augmenting it with any mass mailings. This list is generally made up of customers who have taken a class during the past X number of years, or spent a certain amount of money over that period of time. When mailing a Summer Camp specific brochure, DO NOT just use this same list. Create a new best customers/past customers list that only looks at customers who have registered for Summer Camps in the past. Using the full past customer list will lead to wasted brochures since you will be mailing to customers who have taken classes at your program, but never a Summer Camp or even youth programming. By using only a Summer Camp specific list, you will free up more brochures to be distributed by other means, such as carrier routes.
Target Summer Camp Specific Carrier Routes
At LERN we recommend using carrier routes instead of zip codes or saturating your entire community when doing a mass mailing. This allows you to be more targeted and potentially reduce the number of brochures you print and mail. With LERN’s free to members Market Segmentation and Carrier Route Analysis we can identify which carrier routes in your community currently produce the most registrations and revenue for your program currently. We recommend targeting these routes because something about your programming clearly resonates with these customers and there are probably plenty of other demographically similar people living on those same routes that would potentially be interested in that same programming.
This holds true for summer camps as well. Isolating just your past summer camp registrations and identifying what carrier routes they are coming from will produce a list of the best routes to target for future summer camp mass mailings. These routes will typically have a high concentration of school-age children and produce the best response rate for your mailing. Using just past summer camp registration data to find which carrier routes to target will eliminate all those registrations from unrelated classes like enrichment and professional development.
As part of your membership, LERN can help you pick the right carrier routes to target for your summer camp mailings with our Market Segmentation and Carrier Routes Tool. Just email [email protected] for information on how to take advantage of this free-to-members service.
Rent or Buy Lists with the Right Demographics
Renting or buying lists can be effective if you have the resources to do so, just make sure you are using the correct lists. Use lists that target certain demographics like households with certain age children, a household in certain school districts or certain income levels. Combining these factors you can ask for a list that, for instance, targets households with children aged 8-16 and with a household income over $70,000. Finding out where to set the household income level can be done by surveying past participants about their socioeconomic demographics and then trying to target similar households/people. When buying/renting mailing lists it is important to be as specific and targeted as possible because that is the true advantage of a bought or rented list.
Remember, as a LERN member you can always submit your registration data for a Market Segmentation and Carrier Routes report or schedule a consulting call to discuss your summer camp or general brochure distribution process. Just email a request to [email protected] and let us help you get your brochures in the right hands!