If you’re looking at this on a large screen the image is actually bigger than an iPhone 5s. And still, it’s unreadable. Is this how you want to greet a potential guest?
RLC Design Services is a cutting edge, network savvy, SEO specialized, website design company. So why on earth would we be doing a snail mail marketing campaign? Well, think of it as a last ditch effort.
One of our favorite industries to work with has to be RV Parks. While they’re a favorite, they’re also extremely difficult to reach. Why? Most owners don’t run their day to day operations. Instead they have employees or work campers running the front desk, answering the phones, registering guests, and looking through e-mail for reservations.
We’ve sent out hundreds and thousands of contacts via e-mail. But honestly we don’t know who is reading the e-mails. The high probability is that those individuals screening incoming e-mail aren’t the owners. And when they come across our contact via e-mail it hits the trash.
So……we decided to try a new route. Post cards. Not just any postcards though, postcards with the park’s actual website on an iPhone 5S screen. That screen is 2 inches by 3.5 inches. And the screen capture fits perfectly on a post card. The card itself is 4.25 inches by 5.5 inches. Plenty of room to see what your website looks like on a mobile device, and for a simple message from us……
We can’t read your website on mobile…at all….seriously 🙁
If you squint really hard you can read the site on the postcard above. Their menu at the top is nearly unreadable. If I were hunting for a park, I’d move on in my search.
RLC Design Does Snail Mail….Ouch!
Once again, this image is actually larger than my iPhone screen, and I still can’t read the navigation menu (with 22 buttons on it…way too many). Mobile is useless here, and full sized view is confusing with too many navigation options.
So yes, a test snail mail marketing campaign is under way. Knowing that our e-mails most likely hit the junk box or get dismissed to the trash prior to even reading, and knowing that many parks don’t even realize how useless their sites are on mobile, we thought we’d try the postcard route. It’s a simple message, and easy enough to understand. Mobile visitors can’t read or navigate your website off the bat. You have 15 seconds to invite people to stay and look at your site, and if they’re zooming or flipping their mobile devices you’re wasting that 15 seconds…..
Our hope for this little campaign is simple. We’d like park employees or owners see what their website looks like on mobile for probably the first time. The other interesting thing with many RV Parks? They don’t look at their own Internet presence after their site has been built. Which explains images with date stamps from 2002, copyrights from 2004, and rate sheets from 2001.
Earlier this year while traveling we stayed at Augie’s Quail Trail in Gila Bend, AZ. We stayed there because we were impressed with their website, and it looked like a nice park. It wasn’t a work trip that day, so we went with a park that already had a modern site, and we heard an interesting story. They’d redone their website a few months prior (we missed them). Clients kept telling them their website was useless on mobile. And finally the Park Manager and the Owner sat down to look at their site….and they realized they hadn’t looked at it in years……That’s normal and typical!
Hopefully other park owners seeing their own park’s mobile website on the front of a postcard will focus their attention on the fact that they’re alienating about half their potential client base. Yes, I said half. More than 50% of all searches online are conducted via mobile devices (smartphones & tablets). If they can’t read the park’s site? Move on to the next one. Sorry to say, but that is how it works these days, and RLC Design has the data to prove it from our own client sites.
Mobile for everyone
Of course, mobile friendly websites aren’t just for RV Parks. We do mobile websites for all of our clients because that’s the direction information flow is going. If you want to stick your head in the sand and continue spending thousands per year on your Yellow Pages ad, that’s your business (not for long though). But if you’re ready to really leverage your Internet presence, contact us today. The conversation is free, and so are the laughs.