Challenge
The Nautical Club is a luxury condominium resort on the coast of North Carolina. The developer needed to begin an initial marketing campaign to reach high net-worth individuals interested in purchasing vacation/second home investment property. The challenge was to get out the brand and drive potential buyers to reservation events around the state in order to sell "pre-construction" units.

Solution
Beach List Direct provided participated as a "team-player" along with the developer's team, including lenders, listing agents, to provide guidance in setting up an initial direct marketing program. We proposed a mail piece that would help establish the Nautical Club brand and tell recipients about the development and the huge "pre-construction" incentives being offered. Each mailer contained an invitation to a "Private Reservation Event" in their area (determined by zip code), and reminded them about the Grand Sales Event onsite that would follow a month later.

Targeted Lists
After determining that initial tests would be conducted in North Carolina only, Beach List Direct went after targeted mailing lists that represented the desired target demographic (income, investment history and geography selects). After carefully consideration of a number of list sources, BLD narrowed them down to 8 different list sources to produce 100,000 initial names to mail to in our target areas of the state.

Direct Mail Design & Print Production
BLD designed and produced a multi-part mailer comprised of a folding mail piece containing 2 invitation inserts. These were placed in a nice, but simple cream envelope with just the pre-printed return address on the back flap, and the recipients name and address on the front in a hand written inkjet font. Postage was a pre-sort first class stamp. All of these elements produced a mail piece that got opened, instead of "canned".

BLD provided a turn-key production solution for The Nautical Club, by providing print and lettershop vendors and managing them, keeping the client in the approval process the entire way.

Newspaper Advertisements
To support the mailing, Beach List Direct produced a media schedule and budgets for quarter page and half page full color ads in reservation-event area newspapers. Ads were designed to create excitement about the development and generate interest in the reservation/sales events. No building renderings or photos were used (the site was in pre-construction mode at this time). Instead, we emphasized through the use of local photography, the incredible nature all around, from the ocean to the sound.

Results
Our initial tests in the North Carolina market produced measured response, with other variables such as weather, time of year and market economy playing a role. Future phase marketing efforts will take these variables into account, including analyzing response and conversion data, as marketing expands outside of the state.