I was just curious to see what your first marketing campaign was when you first started your web hosting company. How did you let the world know that you are open for business?

Please tell us what year that was and how did you spend your first advertising dollars? What was the impact from your first campaign?

Best,

This one is not fair for me to answer, we started hosting to support our advertising company! I used to work in the family business of print / direct mail ads (Similar to The Clipper if you get that, it is a more national company).

Since we had the servers and a way to advertise real cheap, we got into the hosting business too. Was a good way to get off the ground. Don't know if I was paying retail prices for the same ads if it would have been worth it.

I don't think it matters what price you paid, I think it was worth it in the long run. You saw the opportunitiy and you took advantage of it. Very smart indeed.

If you could share with us - what was the average result from sending out direct mail? How many customers would you say you got from your mailings, and what was the conversion rate?

Best,

Since it was in a magazine, it got to 100,000 homes a pop. Usually 1% responce is very respectable in this type of advertising. We used my ad as a filler when we had nothing else to drop in but I would see a few subscriptions after each run.

If you can get to a house for 1 or 2 cents per house, and get a .5% hit ratio, you can hope to get 10 to 30% conversion. That is about what I saw. THen again, a few ads has almost no action. Need to be there at the time the customer is thinking about hosting to get a chance, so going in a few times can start to help.