HACKER Q&A
📣 indiethrowaway

Advice for direct mail marketing for SaaS?


Solo bootstrapper here, with a SaaS catering to brick & mortar small/medium businesses. Restaurants and bars, primarily.

I have a hunch that, because of our typical customer, direct mail marketing might work better than CPC ads (which we've used so far) for new customer acquisition.

I'd like to give it a try, but I don't know where to start.

Problem 1: Where do I find postal mail lists of restaurant owners (business address)? I am guessing there are brokers for this stuff out there. Are there any that are higher quality than others?

Problem 2: Who do I contract to do the printing and mailing? Maybe 1+2 have the same solution/vendor.

My basic goal is to mail a postcard (or possibly a modest piece of schwag) with a coupon/incentive to try our product.

I'd love any related anecdata on experiences with offline marketing from smaller / indie devs!

  👤 bragr Accepted Answer ✓
I worked the front desk at a small brick and motor IT shop as one of my first jobs. One of my main tasks was rebuffing all the door to door salesmen and telemarketers as well as dumping all the mailers directly into the trash. Which is all to say, I don't think this will be as effective as you think, because the volume of this kind of advertising is already through the roof, so the signal to noise is poor, and it's very unlikely that those mailers would ever end up in the hands of the decision makers, and you'll mostly just annoy the underlings who handle the mail.

As for question 1 & 2, you'll need to contract a marketing company probably. They will have access to the lists, the printers, relationships with the postal service etc. I doubt getting access to those lists on your scale would be cheaper than just contracting the whole thing out.

If you are looking for alternate ideas, I'd suggest going to trade shows/conferences/expos. I know these are big with restaurant owners for building out their restaurants in the first place so that may be your best bet for getting your sales pitch in front of the decision makers.