Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, link building, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
People usually only read the classifieds if there looking for something specific...like a car, or a house or something. I have never read the classifieds.
Your a t-shirt person, if you were to stumble across this ad in print you're telling me you wouldn't take a look.
ATTENTION The Worlds Greatest T-Shirts In The World Are Now Available. Quantities Are Limited Get One Before It's To Late. Go To muncheys.com
I can honestly say that wouldn't even pique my interest for a moment.
"World's Greatest" is tired and uncreative - it doesn't inspire confidence that the product will be any better. The grammatical errors are highly off putting (I expect a 25 word ad to be perfect - it's not hard), the repetition is a serious waste of limited space, and the only way I'd have of knowing what I was in for is the name (Muncheys) which, while not bad, doesn't tell me anything or attract me.
Nor could I do that much better, because text isn't a great medium for this.
Off the top of my head, the only things I can think of that would attract me are 1) A big sale (if you're doing that, yes it will probably work), or 2) Known names - for example "New Banksy designs available!" &etc.
An ad needs to offer more than just "there's a t-shirt site here" - it needs something out of the ordinary to make me think I may want to buy from them.
A banner ad is just a click away, so you might as well click it and find out - but a print ad means memorising the url (or keeping the ad aside), remembering to check when you get to a computer, and then specifically choosing a time to go and look at the site. The customer needs to be motivated to want to do that.
The topic was about sending direct mail campaigns (if you check out the Google Answers link in the original post, there's a lot of great information there).
I think effective advertising is about targeting your market as much as possible. A classified ad "might" work because of the shotgun approach, but I think there are better ways to spend ad dollars. That's just my opinion.
However, my original foray into selling t-shirts online was started by me spending WAY too much money on a classified ad in a Major national magazine (Rolling Stone). The results were less than dismal.
There is a certain demographic that reads newspapers and there are certain businesses that have budgets to keep running ads that aren't "direct response" ads. Some businesses run ads for months on end in a paper or magazine because they feel it gives them branding exposure.
That's different than what I was getting at with this thread (direct response marketing).
Your a t-shirt person, if you were to stumble across this ad in print you're telling me you wouldn't take a look.
ATTENTION The Worlds Greatest T-Shirts In The World Are Now Available. Quantities Are Limited Get One Before It's To Late. Go To example.com
Re: Direct Mail and Postcards Effectiveness 
Re: Direct Mail and Postcards Effectiveness 
