Postage is increasing substantially next month, I had an email a couple of days ago from Royal Mail showing the new Special Delivery rates. I am not increasing my postal charges immediately but I cannot imagine that I will be able to hold the price once the Winter comes around again. The new rates mean that I will be out of pocket on most orders that I send. It really annoys me because Special Delivery is exactly what was once called 'first class post'. Royal Mail only guarantee that they will deliver the next day before 1pm, this is just what first class mail used to be, in fact I remember when my post arrived before 7.30 am. I am lucky now if it arrives before lunch time. If a parcel is delayed all that is refunded is the postage - big deal! That said almost all my parcels do arrive on time and I very rarely have anything arrive damaged. This is the first week of 2012 that I haven't had to enclose a single heat pack in my parcels.
It has been a lovely warm week and the bramble and other plants are finally growing (perhaps I can soon collect food plants nearer to home and not have to venture out to the Homebase car park each week for bramble). Everything seems to be happy and breeding in my bug house. Lots of new stick insects, baby Hissing cockroaches and my lovely Chile Beauty tarantula has laid an enormous egg sac.
I am not sure if I will make it to the bug show this weekend, I think it is a couple of hundred miles away and I'm not sure if we will be able to get petrol. If we manage to fill up before setting off, can we be sure of finding petrol on the way back, especially on a Sunday? I don't know, I will have to think about it seriously. I just wish the show were a little closer. The queues for petrol were crazy today. My local petrol station had a queue that was so long I couldn't see the end of it and several places that I passed had no petrol left at all.
Now to my newsletter! I still haven't had time to get organised and resend it to the customers that it hadn't reached last week but I have had some great feedback. It looks like there may be a winner for the longest serving customer of mine. He was ordering from me in 1986 and is pretty sure that he had received bugs from me even before this date. I also had an email from a current customer who pointed out that he was born in November 1982, when my first list was produced. It makes me feel pretty ancient but it is fun hearing about people's early experiences of my business. The newsletter went out to well over 1,000 people and as this one was sent out via Mailchimp it comes with statistics which are interesting to read. I need to sit down with hubby and go through it and work out who I need to re-send to. I am useless with this sort of thing, plus I never get any spare time. This weekend we are having a family party for my husband's birthday on Saturday and then the show is on Sunday (maybe). From what I could see only one person has chosen to unsubscribe and states " no longer interested" which is fair enough as this person had only ever once placed an order and it was for a praying mantis, which I no longer stock. Another person was showing as unsubscribed due to spam but this may have been a filter on his email because the list only went out to those people who had chosen to subscribe to it. I am surprised how many of my regular customers are not subscribed. I assume that people can go into their account and chose to subscribe at a later date. Last time that I sent a newsletter it contained a voucher code for free or reduced postage (I can't quite recall). I can recall however that I had a customer who was upset that he had been told about the voucher but not received one. I pointed out that he needed to be a subscriber to receive newsletters, otherwise I would be sending out spam.
If I do manage to get to the show I will have lots of new stock next week, especially millipedes and spiders. If I don't I will have a far more peaceful Easter with fewer bugs to look after! Due to the two bank holidays posting will be severely reduced next week. I may only post orders on Monday and Tuesday because Wednesday may be a bit dodgy due to Good Friday.
Anyway Happy Easter, if you are going away I hope you can find petrol!
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