Small Postcard Reaps Large Crop of Benefits
for 100-Year-Old Orchard Family

Milburn Orchards, near Elkton, Maryland, has almost 400 acres of fruit trees, and some of their orchard plots are located a few miles from their farm market. The earliest fruit offered is cherries (the cherry orchard is about 6 miles away), and the Milburns wanted to promote their farm stand to their U-Pick cherry customers, some of whom had never visited the shop.

The Milburns are very diligent about sending out flyers and emails about upcoming events, but didn't think much about making an offer on them. So I designed a small postcard for them that used their distinctive apple logo on kraft brown stock, which said simply, Time to Visit the Orchard, in large red letters on the address side, and a bold, red subhead mentioning a valuable coupon on reverse. The underscored headline on the reverse, The Cherries Are Coming!, was followed by a short description of the types of cherries offered, how delicious they are for fresh eating or in pies, and when they would be available.

We also included a bit of urgency. Cherries are only on for about two weeks-when you miss them, they're gone! So the copy stressed the weather-sensitivity of the crop, and listed a toll-free hotline number to call before coming. See postcard copy.

The offer was designed specifically for the house list of previous cherry customers (1,850 addresses). Cherry customers are generally young families and older couples, so the offer was for two free ice cream cones at the farm stand with every bucket (about 20 lbs) of cherries picked.

Twenty-five percent of their list responded with postcards in hand-some picking enough cherries for ten ice cream cones. The campaign generated almost $9,000 in cherry sales for an ROI of 965%, and drove people to the farm stand to redeem the coupon, where they not only got their ice cream, but probably bought more items in the stand. In fact, the ROI was probably higher, because farm-stand purchases were not tracked-something the market remedied in subsequent mailings.

Tourist Town Merchants Profit
from Growing Website Traffic

For the merchants of historic Chesapeake City, Maryland, located on the banks of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, tourism is lifeblood. However, running a small business leaves little time for marketing the town's qualities to visitors largely derived from neighboring Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware-especially on small-business budgets.

To ramp up the town's visibility during the dawn of the Internet, Apryl Parcher decided to buy the rights to the domain, chesapeakecity.com in 1995, and created the town's first website there to draw tourism to the town.

At the time, she had her own gift shop in Chesapeake City and was active in the merchant's association. The municipality had no web presence at the time, so she also offered the town government a free page on the site, and sold advertising space on the page to the restaurants, B&Bs and other merchants to help pay hosting fees.

Today, the town municipality now has its own site, but Apryl Parcher Freelance Writing Services, LLC still maintains www.chesapeakecity.com, which remains the premier tourism site for visitors, generating thousands of visits from all over the world per month during the peak summer season, with content and inbound links that keep it at the top of organic search engines. Banner ads on the website purchased by merchants have increased their visibility noticeably, and merchants have the ability to check their link statistics and add information to the event calendar, which is one of the most popular pages on the website.

Over the past five years, traffic to the website has increased on average, 2,000 visits per month each year.

Café Sees Increased Business with Website

The sleepy tourist town of Chesapeake City, Maryland sees a large influx of visitors every summer, but many merchants need alternate income in the winter months when town foot traffic is slow.

Bohemia Café and Bakery opened its doors in the mid-1990s, and did fairly well on the owner's hard work and customer service. Owner Vernie Weisenegger doesn't do much advertising, but did agree that a website wasn't a bad idea-especially since he had a catering business outside the restaurant, which he wanted to promote.

After Apryl Parcher Freelance Writing Services, LLC wrote a small website for him, and linked it with a banner ad on the town tourism website, Weisenegger started to see an increase in his catering business. In 2006, its first year of operation, the website banner ad alone generated over 2,800 visits to his website, and visits continue to increase. Between his active café season and the multitude of catering clients, Bohemia Café is busy year 'round, and doesn't have to worry about a winter slump.