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Make holiday promotions meaningful
By Ann Williams | June 16, 2008
I have in front of me two flyers from Seeff Properties that I received through the post this year. The first is for Mother’s Day and the second is for Father’s Day. While I am all for doing special promotions for the various holidays in our calendar year, I am a little sceptical about whether these campaigns really achieved much. Here’s why…
The Mother’s Day flyer started with a promising sub-heading of: “As a mother, you always lend a helping hand. Let us do the same for you.” Fine. That’s nice to note. But so far, nothing special to get me considering Seeff on this particular day.
Then it goes on to tell the reader that they give a hassle-free process of buying property, which is then followed by: “So, this Mother’s Day…” Now hang on a minute. Just saying ’so,…’ doesn’t mean that there is a good link between Seeff’s buying process and Mother’s Day. (While it may be a hassle-free process with Seeff, buying a house is hardly a stress-free process and probably not the way I would be spending my Mother’s Day by choice. Now obviously there are some people who would like to go and look at other people’s houses on Mother’s Day, but does Seeff really want to waste their time by encouraging voyeurs rather than real buyers?)
It then goes on with: “… so why not relax and take an arm-chair tour of our properties on our award-winning website, www.seeff.com or even better, get chauffeured to one of our showhouses in your area. After all you deserve it.” But surely I can get driven to one of the houses you are selling any day of the year?
The Father’s Day flyer also just made me think that they were a bit desperate to tag a promotion onto anything they could find. There just didn’t seem to be anything special about this one either.
It reads: “This Father’s Day, if you could wish one thing for your family would it be… Seeff.” Well, er, if you really pushed Dad for an answer - it would probably be NO. After all, isn’t Father’s Day the one day of the year when the family is supposed to be wishing at least one thing for Dad? Such as maybe getting Dad a good beer and actually letting him watch the big match instead of him having to worry about the family for a change?
I came away from reading these two flyers with the overall impression of ’so what’. If you want to do a holiday promotion, than you will probably get more mileage for your advertising money by giving some kind of special.
Seeff could have tried something such as online competitions, open only on each of those days - or for anyone actually buying a house on that day. The ladies could have been given a prize such as a day at the spa, and the gents something like a new set of tyres. Basically, there needed to be some really good reason for the special person of the day to want to spend their time with Seeff instead of with their family.
© Ann Williams
Topics: Direct Mail, Promotions |
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