Creating a mailing list with Twitter

A month ago I had the chance to work on the website of a client. He was the owner of a local sushi restaurant. We started talking about promotion and I was shocked to find out that when he mailed out coupons through a local distributor, each mailing cost nearly $ 5000. The owner admitted that it was very expensive but he always ended up making a profit from the mailings so he was okay with the heavy price tag.

I had personally been playing around with Twitter marketing the past few months for my own projects. I asked the owner if he would be interested in a Twitter marketing campaign. Since this was a new endeavor, I said that I would start a campaign for him at no charge and we agreed that I would receive a commission at the end of the month for all the customers that came to the restaurant and mentioned my special “Twitter” coupon.

I fired up my Twitter marketing software, Tweet Attacks and started adding all users within a 5 mile radius of the restaurant. By the end of the first week, I had a list of nearly 300 users. I set Tweet Attacks and post my 10% off coupon every 30 minutes so the users on my list would be sure to see it. The next week I decided to expand the radius to 10 miles and only follow users who mentioned the word “sushi”. While this didn’t turn up nearly as many new followers, the ones I got were obviously very targeted. I continued tweeting about the 10% off coupon as well as a tweet with a link to the full menu. After 2 weeks, I had 402 followers. The owner called me at the end of the second week and he was very excited. He said that there were 6 new customers however one of them shared the 10% off coupon at their local office so one of the new parties was a group of employees which came in to try the restaurant for lunch! I continued adding users and tweeting the same tweets until the end of the month.

My totals for the month were 22 new customers or orders. The average order was a $ 67 so if you do the math, you can see that equaled over $ 1400 in orders just from Twitter. The other part of this is many of these customers will come back and spend money at the restaurant over and over again so the initial $ 1400 isn’t really the story. It’s still early in the year but if trends continue, this could be an extra $ 10k for the restaurant or more if you consider how many new customers will come in by the end of the year and also the return customers.

Now imagine if you did the same thing for your local business if you were a doctor or a dentist where the average customer spends over $ 1000. Twitter can be a very powerful marketing tool and the best part is it’s very easy to use and as far as marketing expenses go, it’s very affordable.

You can grab the software I use at: http://www.tweetattackscoupon.com and save $ 20 off the professional version which is what I use. Thanks for reading!