Q: I have a question regarding brochure ratio for our Community Education program. Could you direct it to someone that could help answer the question. We mail out 48000 brochures each session and our enrollment numbers each time is usually around 3500 to 4000. Is the ratio of 13 to 1 good or what does that say we should be doing with our distribution. In one of your older Course Trends it said to distribute more brochures if the ratio was around 10-1. Our program was looking at cutting back and doing direct market to about only 10,000 of our current students. Any advice?
A: A ratio of 13/1 is amazing. That is a response rate of almost 8%. In your situation, we would recommend that you proceed with caution when changing your mailing strategy. While you might make some small savings on printing and mailing costs, unless you know exactly where your registrations are coming from, you run a huge risk of reducing mailings in areas that would produce registrations and losing them if you don't mail there.
There are some things you can do to determine whether you can safely reduce your mailings. I strongly recommend that you request a LERN carrier route analysis. This is a free service to members, and the information we provide to you will tell you whether you are mailing to areas that are not giving you an acceptable return on your marketing investment. If that is the case, you might safely reduce mailings to those areas.,
However, LERN data suggests that you can increase enrollments by doing more mailings--mailing twice to your best customers. Members have seen enrollment increases when they send the brochure out to their mailing list and then, about two weeks later, do a second, smaller mailing to best customers. In your case, if there are areas where you can safely reduce your mailings, you might redirect those brochures to your best customers.
There are two ways to increase your operating margin--increasing income or cutting costs, When cost cutting also results in income loss, as cutting back on marketing often does, you do not benefit from any cost reduction, and may, in fact, have a weaker financial performance. If you are interested in having LERN do an analysis of your current enrollment data, email us at info@lern.org and request a carrier route analysis. We will provide you with information about how to submit your information. We can also consult with you on how to make changes safely to minimize risk to your enrollment numbers. Any changes in marketing should be tested on a small scale and evaluated before making large scale changes.