Our Town America Finds New Local Customers

Edge Automotive has been able to pull in an average of 500 new customers a year using a mailing system developed by Our Town America.

The system enables small businesses throughout the country to promote their services to new movers.

Edge’s customers spend about $600 per year, and the Sylvania, OH auto repair shop generates less than $1 million annually, says owner Jerry Dunne. He likes the service – which costs about $1 per prospect — because he doesn’t have to take the time to send out his own mailings and can concentrate on the business of fixing and servicing cars.

The new customers generated seem to be pretty stable and reliable, notes Dunne. “These are usually people who’ve made a conscious decision to come to this area, are usually new homeowners and are probably likely candidates for repeat business,” he says. Other typical users of Our Town America include restaurants, dry cleaning establishments, dentists and veterinarians.

“[When] I ran a pizza business, I found the Welcome Wagon [model] the most effective form of advertising,” says Michael Plummer, CEO of Our Town America. “It was better than radio.”

He then began offering new customers in his restaurant one-time gifts. He soon founded Our Town, which employed “hostesses” who welcomed new families to the neighborhood. By 1978, he decided to take the program national through the U.S. Postal Service.

The company now sends more than six million new movers in the U.S. and Canada welcome offers from local merchants based on Zip codes. Our Town also personalizes gift certificates, tracks the identities of those who redeem the offers, and supplies merchants with the names and addresses of customers.

Each week, Our Town gets several million new-mover names from local utility companies and runs them against its own software to confirm the information. It also designs mailing pieces for merchants to send to the new movers.

Until 2003, the company worked exclusively through its local distributors. Since then, the firm, now headquartered in Pinellas Park, FL has worked through its Web site at www.ourtownamerica.com, says Plummer.

At present, Our Town America has 37 distributors, a number it hopes to increase.