offline classified ads response rates discussion

[bigdreamer]

I just decided to try some offline classified ads marketing for my site to sell my digital product. I calculated some numbers and wanted to get others peoples thoughts. Are my figures realistic and safe to assume?

Home delivered local classified ads delivered with the home owners normal mail. I paid $228 for local newspapers not big city newspapers with combined circulation of 399,000 homes.

So here is my math trying to assume worst case scenario.
Of 399,000 homes if only 0.30% respond and look at my site that would mean about 1197 people would visit my site.

Out of those 1197 people If only 0.50% buy my product that would be 5 sales out of 399,000 homes and I would still be profitable considering my sale price.

I hope to convert more of those 1197 people but used 0.50% to calculate worst case results.
Without disclosing my niche market I will say it can be marketed to all English speaking countries.

Are my figures realistic and safe to assume?

[sub8hr]

Stats and projections are all BS until you run the thing and see what happens.

[Sven]

Indeed. Your calculations seem fair and the price for the add is not bad so try it out!

Marketing is all about making assumptions and then testing them on a small scale, if correct, go big!

[Matthew Connors]

I hope you do get that many responses but that seems optimistic to me.

From my experience when you are the only advert they see you can expect to get 3-5% on average. But when you advert makes up less then 0.01% of the text in a newspaper my estimate would be something like 3-5% of 0.01% of the readers. But like Sub8hr said its aall BS till you run it. The readers in one may be omen minded business people and you may get a rediculously high traffic, while the readers in another may be highly conservative and you get very little traffic.

[bigdreamer]

Thanks everyone.... just wanted to see what others thought thanks for the input. I am just going to have to wait and see. I choose to run the ad in Pennysavers in Florida and Maryland. Everyone who gets these Pennysavers know they are all ads so they will either throw it out right away or if they are looking for a job or something else might take the time to look at it.

(For those that don't know what the Pennysaver is...Its a free small booklet classified publication that is 10-15pages directly mailed and placed in peoples mailboxes which means it has a better chance of actually making it into the home and into the persons hands.)

From all the research and responses I been getting on other forums The normal response rate for print ads with a call to action to a website is 0.60%.

The 0.30% I used for my math is half of what others are saying is normal (0.60%) after the CTR or in this case response rate I don't see any reason why I cant convert more than 0.50% into customers cause at this point they are targeted customers. But I used this low 0.50 percentage to give me a margin of error.

(the ad I ran in the paper took a lot of thought cause I wanted to hook them and grab their attention but still not attract window shoppers or the curious as Tim suggest in his book. I also wanted to make sure my ad gave the reader a good idea of what my product was.)

I know I will get much cheaper and targeted results with adwords but I still have much to learn about adwords before stepping into that battlefield.

I agree everything is all BS until I really try it. I just wanted to try to make educated decisions and assumptions rather than shooting in the dark.