We've mailed nearly 50,000 postcards for only $300. They’ve generated over $40K in revenue so far.
So last year I met a guy at a networking event that told me that he was sending out 10,000 postcards every month for his lawn care business for virtually $0.
What he'd do was divide up one side of a 6x11" postcard into 8 slots and sell those slots as "ad spaces" to other businesses for 5-10 cents a postcard. This covered the entire cost of the postcard (and some depending on how much he sold the slots for)
Then on the other side of the postcard, he'd put a full size ad for his company.
I was skeptical at first, but ultimately decided it was worth a shot for our epoxy flooring business since we've already had great success with targeted mailers + EDDM.
It was surprisingly easy to get other businesses on board with it especially since we only allowed one company from each category to join. $500 to get into 10,000 households is a pretty good deal for them.
Thus far we've sent out about 50,000 pieces over 5 batches and that's turned into 13 jobs or so which is about $40k. We spent about $300 to get the targeted mailing list (income, home ownership status, etc) for the first batch.
We honestly could be turning a profit on each mailing and get paid to advertise if we charged a little more, but it didn't sit well with me to do that.
Anyways, just a little tip to try if you're looking for "inexpensive" (you still have to do some legwork) ways to get in front of a lot people.
I think we're going to see a resurgence of offline marketing methods.