Frequently Asked Questions

We make effective marketing and advertising easy while saving you money.

We believe that the size of your advertising budget doesn't have to determine the effectiveness of the advertising program. If you market smart (to the right people, with the right piece), your advertising budget generally doesn't have to be huge. In those cases when it does need to be large (many competetive shops in a small area, for example), it's just as important to focus your budget on what works.

Traditional thinking says that blanketing the town with your advertisements will attract good customers every once in a while. In this line of thinking, if you spend more money and create and mail more advertisements, you'll attract more of the desireable customers that benefit your shop. Even more money, even more good customers. Nothing about this line of thinking is effective or affordable.

What we're saying is forget marketing to everyone and concentrate on marketing only to those great customers -- ones who spend money, and who come back year after year because of your customer service.

Only if you're willing to stop advertising to your customers' garbage cans, stop spending money on radio & TV, and stop wasting money on the Yellow Pages! Traditional advertisements are like dumping money into your garbage more often than not, so you've got to ditch them if you're ever going to compete with the big spenders!

In contrast, we offer pieces like our Dear Neighbor Letter™ (DNL), a powerful stand-alone piece that your potential customers can't ignore. (You can learn more about the DNL by visiting our marketing solutions page.)

Independent businesses are also at a disadvantage because they lack buying power. Because AMG™ creates and orders hundreds or thousands of pieces per month, however, we can combine the orders to save money on supplies, services and labor. Those savings get passed along to you, the client.

Our short answer: Yes!

With the DNL, we provide Secret Shopping for businesses in order to help perfect the interaction with customers. After all, a bad telephone experience can easily override the value of a perfect marketing piece.

We also offer a professionally designed monthly customer newsletter as well as a magnet mailer that help with your internal marketing, and also website design services to help attract new customers in ways that the Yellow Pages never could.

You can learn more about the newsletter, magnet, websites and about secret shopping in marketing solutions.

We follow through frequently in order to partner with the business owner/manager. Our goal is to stay on top of a business' needs, as well as to stay up-to-date with the tracking data from our advertising programs.

We teach every client how to track and measure the effectiveness of our programs -- as well as every other type of advertising and promotion that they do. The number of responses is only part of the information needed to calculate true Return On Investment. And in response to the second question, the AMG™ tracking system is quick, easy-to-use and maintain, and is very sustainable.

Our products and services are designed to be as convenient for you as possible.

For DNL clients, we handle every aspect of the process ourselves, from creation to copy-writing to printing, list-compilations and mailing. Newsletter clients have several choices, ranging from our professionally-designed e-mail template all the way up to our full Turn-Key service. Magnet clients need only provide a company logo and coupons. And finally, Website clients have several options, ranging from small, template-driven sites, all the way up to large, database-driven sites.

Most of these products are offered for just one low price per piece, and none have hidden fees or expenses (Because the complexity of a website depends on the client, there is no set price for our design services).

For starters, check out our marketing approach. We only offer pieces that are proven to work effectively in independent shops.

Besides that, here are a few ways that we're different from every other marketing company:

Our basic monthly customer newsletter (template only) is a hard and fast $87. For everything else (including turn-key service on the newsletter), it really all depends on what you need, so we can't give you a specific answer. Without knowing your specific needs or facts like the number of customers in each zip code you want to mail to, we can't give an exact price here in this FAQ.

We can give you a free, no obligation quote, however, so please feel free to contact us and ask.

They tend to start a little slower than most "give away" types of advertising that have expiration dates and keep coming in substantially longer. Normally they will come in as long as 8 to 9 months and we have had DNL clients tell us they got them up to two years later. This really builds up when you mail consistently each quarter so you have up to 3 quarters of mail drops producing.

We mail into the areas you get the most customers from now, but we demographically select the homes to receive the DNL based on their combined family income (More income is not necessarily better.). The idea is to hit the sweet spot for your business...for instance, independent automotive repair shops need to market to the demographic that exists between too much income (they buy or lease new cars, usually) and too little income (because they can't afford to properly maintain their cars).

Absolutely. You'll receive a map of your area that shows where your shop is located, and displays the areas where you're mailing to as marked in red.

You only need to provide a logo, a signature, a basic map and a digital picture of you. Those things, plus 20 minutes with our representative to go over a checklist of points to include in the DNL are what's required of you in the DNL creation process.

Great! Contact with your existing customers is a crucial part of marketing. You may have gotten them into your shop once, but it's just as important to keep them coming back for all of their continued needs.

Wouldn't you like to improve your customer base? Do you have any customers that are a pain to deal with and who never spend much money? Wouldn't you like to replace them with an "A"-level customer that trusts you, and that spends money at your business several times a year? Increasing your business' sales is a function of two things: 1)Having great employees with great customer service; and just as importantly, 2)Having the right kind of customer.

Measure which advertising works and which doesn't and allocate your money gradually over time to the kind that works. We'll show you how to do it so you can have the best mix of advertising dollars.

We have found that this kind of advertising only attracts cheapie-freebie customers (the kind that only wants their free stuff and nothing else). In addition to that, you're paying first-class postage to do it. Free Stuff! coupons can create a lot of traffic, sure, but not much profit. In fact, it generally creates a loss. The DNL, on the other hand gets mailed to everyone: new move ins, existing residents who are not your customers and existing customers. As a result, it covers the territory at a very low cost per letter, and doesn't attract the undesirable customers that Free Stuff! coupons do.

"Response rate" is what the ad agencies want you to focus on. In reality, response rate is a poor indicator of how an advertisement is performing. Response rate can easily be driven up by offering free services and by attaching an expiration date...but if you're pulling down a response rate of 2% (a GREAT rate, Ad Agencies will tell you) and losing money on every response (Free stuff that you give away doesn't make money, after all), you can start to see how response rates are only a tiny sliver of the whole picture.

You should be measuring not only how many respond, but also how many tickets you sell out of those that call (your close rate), how much they spend when they do close, and also (and importantly) whether or not they they come back again.

If you want to see what real results from a direct mail campaign look like, see our clients' testimonials. Or better yet, contact us -- we're happy to answer your questions.

The front page of the DNL looks like a letter written on letterhead. A few changes can be made to the introduction and the closing but the body of the letter has been developed over years, exposed to focus groups and groomed to its current state. The language, sequence of information, bolding/highlighting and what is said have been designed to arouse a series of emotions/thoughts that impact the decision to purchase. As a result, we don't change the body of the letter. The back of the DNL, however, is all about your business -- everything that goes on it is tailored to you, specifically. The elements stay the same (bullet points, map, logos, picture), but it is specific to your business.

When it comes to direct mail, the specific value proposition (what you're offering & in return for what), the language used and how it is used, the bolding and underlining of text, the sequence of buying emotions aroused and why, the layout, size, color, texture and type of paper and other such components all determine the effectiveness.

Beyond that, we wouldn't continue to spend our own money on these if they didn't work -- we are on version 23 of our Auto Repair DNL and have paid for focus groups to give feedback on the elements of the DNL to develop it to its current level, and we continue to develop additional DNL formats as well. More than that, you need not look further than our clients' success stories to see how our marketing solutions are different.