PostalPlus for SME
Issue No. 12 - Nov 2006
Issue Highlight - How does a swimming training centre take advantage of Hongkong Post Circular Service to become the most popular training centre in Hong Kong?
Among Hongkong Post's comprehensive range of services catered for the needs of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Hong Kong, Hongkong Post Circular Service (HKPCS) is one of the popular services welcomed by SME owners. Unlike mass media advertising which requires huge budget, HKPCS is an economical and cost-effective advertising tool that helps SMEs penetrate the market. In this issue, we have invited one of our clients who runs a swimming training centre to share their success story with us.
Swimming is always a popular activity among children, and parents nowadays tend to offer them professional training courses. Although there is a great demand for such courses, the competition in the market is still very keen. As the need for these courses is seasonal and concentrates in the summer vacation, it is a great challenge for the training centres to recruit a large number of students within a short period of time. One of our clients, knowing that they need to fully utilize their expanded facilities, including indoor swimming pools and auditoriums, to make their business viable, decided to use HKPCS to promote their service to the neighbourhood areas right before and during the summer holidays. Their marketing manager has shared with us the strategies and implementation tactics of their promotion programmes.
Mr Tam, Marketing Manager of Stanford Swimming Training Centre, analyzed the effectiveness of various promotion channels for their business development.
Choice of the right advertising medium
According to the marketing manager, they have considered and tested some other promotion channels like TV, radio or press. The results showed that HKPCS made the greatest impact at the lowest cost. They have advertised in TV commercial time, but found that the cost of buying TV airtime and producing a TV commercial was very high. Moreover, the short exposure period of TV advertising, 30 seconds in general, makes it less effective to publicize the details of their strength, like their facilities and training schedules, which is crucial to generate responses. For newspapers, it was also expensive to buy an ideal advertising space to make the desired impact and exposure. They also reckoned huge wastage with these mass advertising means as it was difficult for them to target their advertising messages. All these shortcomings have been overcome by using the direct mail tool, HKPCS. They realize that through promotion in specific areas, they are able to implement their marketing programme within a low budget. HKPCS also gives them the flexibility in providing more details of the training classes in the promotion leaflets. Finally, it is easy to measure the results that enable them to make refinement in follow-up marketing strategies.
Targeting Method
The swimming facilities of the training centre are located in a few areas in Hong Kong. Therefore, they selected their target locations using the HKPCS distribution list to mail their promotional leaflets. To maximize the chance of their leaflets reaching the right targets, they chose newer estates situated near primary and secondary schools from the list. Whenever they set up new swimming facilities, they would conduct an extensive circular mailing in that particular area to aggressively recruit student learners. For the promotion schedule, they dropped the bulk of circulars in May and June to achieve the first mover effect in attracting students before the summer holidays. To sustain the popularity, they maintained a moderate level of circular promotion in July and August.
Programme Implementation
Just like other local SMEs, the swimming training centre also needs to capitalize their resources on work relating to their profession during the peak season. Therefore, they leverage on Hongkong Post¡¯s professional direct marketing by using the one-stop service of HKPCS, from circular design, printing to delivery, which save them much time and effort in implementing their promotion programme.
Since 1998, the swimming training centre has found HKPCS a long-term promotion partner. They have been sending over 500,000 items a year to promote the centre and their training courses. They have used HKPCS smartly to build and strengthen their business. As a result, they are now ranked the most popular swimming training centre in Hong Kong.
Stanford Swimming Training Centre takes advantage of Hongkong Post Circular Service to become the most popular training centre in Hong Kong.
If you are interested to learn other success stories of using direct mail, please visit our dedicated DM website http://www.hongkongpost.com/dm/eng/index.htm
Besides HKPCS, Hongkong Post has a wide range of postal solutions for SMEs. We will participate in the World SME Expo 2006 to be held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from 29th November to 1st December 2006. During the three-day event, Hongkong Post will showcase a range of postal services catering the business needs of SMEs. What's more, we will be speaking at the SME Services Presentation Session at 11:30am on 1st December for sharing "Contemporary Postal Thinking ¡ª How do SME raise their competitiveness by using Hongkong Post¡¯s One-stop Solution?" (The presentation will be conducted in Cantonese.) Souvenirs and special trial offers are exclusive for all event participants. Don't miss this great opportunity and do visit us at Booth B02!
Special thanks to Stanford Swimming Training Center for providing the above information.