The Key to Printed Postcard Advertising Success

Given how competitive the business world can be, you need to advertise your business using the most effective marketing materials that will position your business for augmented customer growth, expansion, and traffic. In other words, it’s all about having the best marketing strategy at your disposal to gain a competitive edge over your myriad of profit-driven competitors.

Direct Mail Marketing

An effective way to promote your brands is through direct mail marketing. While some marketers feel that direct mail is an obsolete advertising medium, reality dictates otherwise. Direct mail actually tends to elicit more responses from prospective customers when compared to email marketing.

However, in order for your direct mail marketing campaign to have an impact, the message must be compelling and insightful, and the design must be simple, clean, and professional. That is, the perceived quality of your business must be superlative or the prospect will simply scoff and throw your postcard in the trash. Remember, you only have a few seconds to make a good first impression, so your postcard advertising needs to stand out and leave the prospective customer with a lasting impression in order for them to call you or visit you.

Create a Client Mailing List

The first thing you need to do before you send out your beautiful postcards is to compile a database. For instance, if you decide that you want to go after different market demographics, then you should create separate databases for each. Once you have created the multiple databases required for each client segment, you need to design direct mail promotions that specifically target each demographic.

For instance, let’s imagine that you have decided to focus on two age brackets. The first will target men and women between the ages of 18 and 34, while the second will target men and women between the ages of 45 and 64. The direct mail campaigns that you then create and launch should be different from each other. This segmented approach to marketing is known as differentiated marketing and helps tests the success of each effort.

How to Find Your Prospective Clients

Before you launch your direct mail campaign, you need to find prospective clients to send your postcards to. There are many sources that you can tap into in order to find prospective customers for your business including, but not limited to, mailing list companies like Canada Post, white pages, trade publications, the yellow pages, newspapers, your local Chamber of Commerce directory, and Precision Targeter for Neighbourhood Mail. It is also very important to remember that you must first know the preferences and needs of your customers before you start developing your leads and mailing lists. In other words, you need to perform sufficient research in order to understand who your target customer is, or your direct mail campaign efforts will be in vain.

Why Postcards are Great For Direct Mail Marketing

Postcards serve as a superb form of direct mail marketing because they are relatively more cost effective to produce, and are also a simple and quick way of getting your message across. For instance, you can quickly advertise the opening of a new retail store, or advertise new business opportunities, products, and services without breaking the bank.

Furthermore, the readership percentage with postcards is virtually 100% because the reader doesn’t have to open an envelope to see the message. Even if the reader doesn’t care or like what they see or read, they will have at least been exposed to your brand, if only for a few seconds. As they say, any publicity is good publicity.

In addition, you can use a postcard to cross sell your various other services and products, and can even include a promotional rebate on the postcard so that the reader can use it as a coupon if they are a new customer. If the reader decides to use the coupon, then you will have converted a prospect into a customer, and, if they like the product or service, then they will likely repurchase it, generating a recurring revenue stream for your business.

Focus on the Message

Some marketers may make the mistake of focusing on flashy postcards. However, the style over substance approach doesn’t always work. Flashy colours and styles may overwhelm the reader, and may overshadow the actual message of your postcard. Stick to a clean layout for your postcard’s background. The font you use should also be easy to read.

If you wish to add a logo to the postcard, then keep its size to a minimum. The last thing you want is for the logo to partially cover up your message or to distract the reader from your primary goal. If you do decide to use a logo, then place it in one of the corners of the postcard.

Engage Your Audience

A good way to engage your audience is to include a puzzle for them to solve on the postcard. Turn the postcard into a mystery or a game, where they need to solve a puzzle in order to uncover the message. People like to be entertained, and most are tired of derivative marketing strategies that are bland and generic. Add a creative and fun interactive element to your postcard that will be memorable so that they can tell their friends and family about it. By doing so, you will not only generate some buzz marketing that didn’t cost you a dime, but you’ll also create a memorable experience that will entice the reader to become a paying customer.

If you would like to learn more on how to maximize your direct mail postcard advertising success, call Troi Mailing Services in Toronto at 1-866-486-0423 or contact us here for a consultation today.