Last Thursday I put our house in Lucan up for sale as we are hoping to move to Straffan. Today, the following wednesday, I received a postcard from an Irish Transport and removal firm called Libra Trans giving details of their service and encouraging us to call for a free estimate.

First of all congratulations to Libra Trans for taking the initiative and implementing a targetted marketing campaign to a clearly defined target market, people moving and selling a house and therefore soon to be in need of a removal or transport firm. The card is well designed and does its job of catching attention. In the pile of other correspondance a colour postcard stands out.

I think the call to action on the postcard is a bit weak, it simply says visit our website or call for a free estimate. Personally I’m never particularly impressed when I see a company say the offer free estimates, whopee you are going to tell me your prices for no charge how good of you. I don’t think theyd get too far saying call for an estimate, it will cost you €50.

The website that Libratrans has lets them down - there were errors on the page whaen I viewed it in IE7, and the quotation request form that is pretty crucial to their operation would not load. It is kind of disappointing to think of all the leads that they must so nearly have generated but then lost by having a website that does not do the job for them.

So how else could Libratrans improve this Irish lead generation campaign? I think they could make their offer even stronger by offering something free, for example on their website they have a checklist of things to remember when packing or unpacking. Rather than having this freely displayed on the website they could create a report package and offer it to prospects who fill out a form etc. Perhaps they could make the offer stronger still by offering something of use such as 3 free packing boxes or similar. This would help them qualify the leads from the postcard mailout a bit further and allow them to capture the names of prospects rather than just ‘The Home Owner’. This would help to build a relationship with the prospect, the cost of this would be minimal and I’d be willing to bet it would increase their conversion rate over and above just offering a free quote (yawn…)

So to conclude I think this was a good effort to generate leads in a targetted fashion. I’m not sure how they compile their list, perhaps they monitor the new properties on www.myhome.ie or maybe it is possible to buy lists of all the new properties. Or perhaps they just ask their drivers to note down all of the new for sale properties they pass. Whichever way they do it you can bet it is nicely systemised and produces a good return on the investment. Lets face it the cost of a postcard and postage would probably be less that €1 and the potential business could easily be €1000 per client. It is a shame that the rest of the sales conversion process they are using falls a bit short, however even with what they have I’m sure it puts them well ahead of their competition.

Now I just need to ring them to get my free quote