It came down to controlling the cost of acquiring new customers. If you use a targeted list, you lower your acquisition costs and raise your response rate. Ultimately, educating our audience required more information than one postcard could allow. TV would have been ideal to tell our story, but it's expensive. Also we weren't able to test target audiences to see who would be the most appropriate, so we guessed.
Testing is a key aspect of direct marketing.
Our original plan was crawl before you walk before you run. We decided to wait until we launched our national overnight service before going after more money so we could show that we could execute a national plan. Everything was planned like clockwork. We needed to close a round of funding in three months. We spent 20 hours a day attacking every avenue we had.