Recently some family of mine received a letter in the mail from their local chamber of commerce asking them to “Buy in Garden Grove!” The letter explained that 25% of the cities revenues come from the local small businesses. The direct mail piece is asking residents to try to keep all of their money within the city. Buying cars, groceries, etc… Makes sense. I mean everyone is hurting and I can’t even begin to tell you how many shops are empty and how many “for lease” signs are now up when I drive through the city.

However they made one really large mistake that is actually quite prevalent by many small businesses today. In their direct mail piece they are asking residents to go to their website (ci.garden-grove.ca.us) and click on the link “Buy In Garden Grove” so that the residents of the city can see all of the participating businesses and the deals that they are offering. The problem? There IS NO LINK, anywhere on their site that says anything about their recent promotion or “Buy In Garden Grove”. In fact the word “Buy” doesn’t even exist (except as part of the word “buyer”) on their home page at all.

This doesn’t surprise me from a government agency per se. I am assuming that they will put it up sometime this week as the mail piece did get delivered today. However the execution of this plan is very flawed. The “Buy in Garden Grove” should be up PRIOR to sending out any advertisements especially very expensive ones like direct mail. It should be up as it is a way to help out the local businesses. However this isn’t just a government problem. I have noticed more and more small businesses using direct mail in this very same fashion. Many small businesses are using the more expensive direct mail to send visitors to their website and than offering no follow through with information about the direct mail on their website.

What’s worse is that direct mail has a cost per conversion that is generally 9+ times HIGHER than the cost of search engine marketing. Now in terms of the city of Garden Grove they had to do the direct mail, really not much better way to make notice of their services to the people because of the government agency and Im sure being a government agency they get some kind of a deal when it comes to bulk mail.

However what small businesses need to take from this is to be diligent when it comes to the execution of your marketing program. If you are going to use offline marketing to advertise web specific ads make sure that your site is updated and ready to go before the first piece of mail or offline marketing even goes out.