Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Joy Gendusa. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Joy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
I hate to bring up Covid… but when the shut downs started, we saw a 41% drop in revenue overnight. I decided I was not going to lay anyone off and I was not going to cut my marketing at all. (We totally pivoted what we were doing but that’s another story.) Making that decision was risky becaue in order to make payroll and continue my marketing, I really couldn’t pay any other bills. So I didn’t.
There is a back story to this decision — back in 2008 when real estate was crashing, banks were freaking out and half the mortgage brokers went back to their day jobs, we saw a big drop in business. I cut my marketing to save money and later really regretted that move. I vowed never to do that again.
So here it is March 2020, our revenue and other key stats have crashed, and I’m spending over $100,000 on marketing every single week. It was definitely risky to decide to pay zero bills — and instead only pay for marketing and payroll.
It actually turned out great. ALL my competitors cut their marketing, so we got all of their leads too and wound up being 10% UP for the year. Crazy.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
If there’s one thing I want people to know about me and my business, PostcardMania, it’s that we are all about small business owners. We live and breathe small business success! We’re obsessed with small businesses because I truly believe they are the backbone and lifeblood of the American economy. When small businesses do well, that means more jobs, more money, more opportunity and more investment right in our own communities — we all win.
Our focus is on bringing road-tested, proven marketing tactics to small business owners across the country so they don’t have to waste their hard-earned money on marketing experimentation. We have an entire department of salaried staff whose job description is to catalog, analyze and share successful campaign strategies with anyone and everyone. We have over 700 marketing case studies on our website with campaign specifics and real-money results. We have thousands more than those but we only publish the ones our clients allow us to. I see it as our job to help small businesses shortcut the marketing journey so they don’t get bogged down by marketing minutia and can get right to generating more leads, sales, and revenue for their business.
We started as a postcard marketing company back in 1998, and that has changed and evolved over the years as marketing — and what it takes for a small business to succeed at marketing — has changed and evolved over the years. It’s my goal that PostcardMania offer everything a small business needs to succeed at marketing under one roof, at a price that’s truly affordable, in a way that’s easy, convenient and results-based. Today, that requires we offer more than just direct mail, although that is still a bedrock of our successful formula. Our campaigns are now technology-led to offer full multichannel integration (for seamless campaigns online and offline), website development, robust campaign performance tracking, and trigger-based automations, making PostcardMania the nation’s leading one-stop shop for all of today’s small business marketing needs.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I founded PostcardMania in 1998 to fill a gap in the direct mail market. I was the first to market to business owners directly. For the first time, business owners could find everything they needed to send a postcard campaign without going through a costly ad agency or print broker.
Just 2 years later, in 2000, our annual revenue broke $1,000,000. By 2003, we broke 7 digits: over $10,000,000 in a year!
But you don’t disrupt an entire industry without your competitors taking notice… and learning how to imitate your success.
All these printers, who were much bigger than me, started to copy my business model and lower their prices, gang up the postcards and advertise directly to small businesses like I did.
It was a scary time. I was being commoditized and it looked like a race to the bottom on price, and PostcardMania and I would be stuck doing more work for less money forever.
I had to fight back. And to fight commoditization in any industry, you have to make yourself valuable. You have to show people you bring something unique to the table that gives them a reason to choose you.
You can’t just say your product or service is the best. Everyone says that. You have to look deeply into your product or service, how your customers use it, and how you can improve their lives or make their experience better.
You can also find something customers HATE about your industry and resolve that issue. That’s what we did. People hate feeling like a marketing campaign is a gamble. They want to feel assured that their campaign will produce results and their hard-earned money won’t be wasted.
So, to set PostcardMania apart, I wanted to play a part in fixing that problem — that fear — people have around marketing.
We repositioned ourselves away from being a printer/mailer and instead as a marketing company that specializes in lead generation using direct mail postcards as the first channel.
This pivot was when I realized that sometimes you really have to change your business fundamentally to survive. We created a new position within the company, a ‘results manager’ — we paid them a good salary and they began cataloging all our campaigns and the results so that we could share that with customers and prospects alike, so that they wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to using a postcard campaign to generate leads. That single role has evolved into an entire department with several staff because business owners really responded to this and there’s true value in knowing exactly what’s worked for someone else in your industry.
Today, we have over 4,000 successful campaigns collected and over 700 case studies written that we share (for FREE) with our clients, prospects, and anyone interested in learning more about how direct mail marketing works.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
I practice what I preach. I mail 180,000 postcards every single week to over 30 industries to promote what we do. I spend about $45,000 per week on pay per click ads as well. Plus I have a full time PR department that gets us published hundreds of times per year. In the past, we would do trade shows, but eventually wasn’t enough ROI for me. So we stick to direct mail, PPC and PR. Tried and True. We track leads and what we call ‘conversations’ — that’s a lead that talks to a rep. We get about 2,800 leads a week, of which about 450 are conversations. So tracking everything and working it backwards is the most effective way we get new clients. How many postcards, how many clicks, create how many actual reaches in, and, out of those reaches, how many will talk to us and out of those how many can we close and make into clients
Contact Info:
- Website: https://postcardmania.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/postcardmania
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/postcardmania
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/postcardmania
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/postcardmania
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/postcardmania