Five Tips for Creating Powerful Postcards

Direct-mail postcard marketing is one of the very best ways to drive return on investment and increase business profitability. Full-color postcards are affordable and earn high response rates when used correctly. Here are five proven tips for creating powerful postcards to market your business: Make a great offer — As with all direct-mail marketing, your postcard should deliver a valuable offer to your customers. Discounts, coupons, promotional codes, free products and free services all drive response. Think like your customers — what would you respond to? Don't be just like your competitors. Instead of offering the expected free consultation, a real estate agent could instead offer a free guide to buying homes, for example. Go big — Oversized postcards such as the 6-inch by 11-inch full-color postcards available from PsPrint make a huge impact in the mailbox and almost always get a first look. They cost slightly more than traditional postcards, but the increased return on investment is almost always worth the small investment. Be bold — Your postcard design and copy should be compelling and offer-focused. Address the needs of your target audience and demonstrate how you are the only solution. Hire a talented graphic designer to create a bright, bold postcard that attracts immediate attention, and employ the talents of a copywriter to craft a headline and message that drives response. Send quality — Don't settle for cheap postcards, which cheapen your company's image. Instead, invest in cost-efficient high-quality postcards printed full-color on 16-point gloss or 13-point recycled matte paper stock to demonstrate that you're in the business of delivering quality products and services. Customers trust a company that can afford quality marketing materials, so skip the desktop and go through a proven online printing company like PsPrint, which prints its postcards on state-of-the-art offset and digital short-run printing presses. Print on both sides — Most mail is delivered with the address side up. Most postcards have nothing printed on this side, which is why many direct-mail postcards end up in File 13. Printing a short but compelling message on the address side of your postcards more than doubles the chance that customers will turn it over to learn about your offer, which in turn fuels response and your return on investment. The 40/40/20 rule of direct-mail postcard marketing states that 40 percent of your success is in your mailing list, 40 percent is in your offer and the remaining 20 is everything else. Make sure you have compiled a highly targeted mailing list and developed a postcard with an offer that meets the needs of your targeted audience. The remaining 20 percent is what will make the difference between you and your competition — while it is a good thing to emulate the efforts of a successful business, you should also work to differentiate yourself through benefits only you can offer. Follow these tips the next time you launch a full-color direct-mail postcard campaign, and you're almost guaranteed to realize an immediate increase in your return on investment.