Magic Plumbing Hopes to Build Business Via Postcards

What does a local plumbing concern do when business starts to slow down and the Yellow Pages doesn’t bring in work the way it used to?

This was the problem facing Magic Plumbing, a $2 million San Francisco contractor.

To at least hold onto existing business, if not expand it greatly, the firm decided the best approach might be a new postcard campaign to likely local prospects.

“We’re going to mail 4,000 consumers, 500 restaurants and 500 property management companies a series of six postcards,” says Paul Rowe, company owner. He hopes reminders six months in a row will keep the name Magic Plumbing fresh in the minds of its recipients.

“[The mailings] are all going out to people who use plumbing,” says Rowe, who hopes this effort will keep as many as his firm’s 14 trucks working as much and as often as possible.

“I want to be able to add another driver or two,” he says.

The copy in these postcards will to be tailored for their specific target market, says Ernest Nicastro, president of Positive Response, Magic’s Dublin, OH agency.”

This is not Rowe’s first try with direct mail. He first used postcards about 15 years ago “to kick start the business,” and last sent out a postcard campaign targeting restaurants and other prospects about six or seven years ago “when the economy was still good.” In each case, he tried doing all the work himself.

But now, Rowe says, he needed to use professionally designed mailing pieces and selected lists. “I couldn’t do it myself anymore and still be a plumber,” he concedes.

And advertising in the Yellow Pages has turned out to be a disappointment, says Rowe.

“The Yellow Pages people say they’re the be-all-to-end-all of everything and it’s just not true,” says Rowe. But he cautions that even though direct mail is often less expensive than the Yellow Pages, “it has to be done right” or it, too, can be equally as unproductive.

In addition, Magic Plumbing, (http://www.magicplumbing.com) has been doing search engine optimization on Google and Yahoo for more than a year, using such key words as plumber and water heater, says Rowe.

Will Magic Plumbing’s postcard effort work? Rowe’s not sure he knows exactly what he’s looking to reap from the postcard campaign.

“But I know I need to be doing this,” he says.