Working for a print company, I get to see a ton of different postcards come through our presses. And from a direct marketer’s perspective, many of these make me cringe. There are some critical ‘postcard marketing elements’ that need to be included to optimize your results and get a better return on your printing and postage investment.
Our service reps frequently ask for feedback on their customers’ creative – to see if I might be able to provide any suggestions to improve performance. Most of my feedback centered on three core elements that should be incorporated in most any postcard. They are:
- Offer
- Call to Action
- Response/contact information
I recently collected a random sample of 50 different postcards from our production floor. I went through them to see how many cards had the different elements listed above. I was shocked to find out that 74% did NOT have an Offer. Additionally, 64% did NOT have a Call to Action. These are incredible numbers – I was amazed to see the majority of our customers are missing such critical elements to their success.
With the next postcard your or your designer create, give a sample to an unbiased friend and have them look at it for 5 seconds (and only 5 seconds), then put it down and ask them these two questions:
- What is the product or service being offered?
- What is the recipient supposed to do after receiving this postcard?
Postcards are like billboards on the freeway, you have a very short window of time to communicate your message. Keep your postcards simple and uncluttered. Use the headline to effectively answer the two questions above. Be sure to include a compelling offer – and call it out graphically so it grabs attention. And tell your customers or prospects exactly what to do (call us, go online, come to our open house, etc…). And don’t hide your contact information!
If you incorporate some of these ideas in your next postcard marketing campaign, I’m confident you’ll see better results and achieve a better ROI on your marketing dollars.
11 Comments until now.
I like the suggestion to ask a friend the two questions about the postcard – good idea. Thanks Jared
Never having taken a marketing class, I was very interested in your comments regarding post cards. Your company printed ours this past year. I wonder how mine fared…I will re-evaluate based on your blogpost. Thanks so much!
Sue – I would be happy to review your postcard creative and give my $.02 if you’re interested. Shoot me an email at jared@printingforless.com
Jared – can you explain the offer element a bit? When you say offer do you mean an offer of product/services? Or do you mean a special, discount or limited-time offer? One is making clear your what your trying to promote, the other is motivating to act now. Or maybe there’s a third option. thanks.
I have been thinking about post cards. Thank you for the tips.
Good advice Jared. I’ve been mailing postcards to prospective clients for several years. My regular is annual postcards with a yearly calendar on the front, superimposed over a pretty picture I took during the year (poppies at the Calif Poppy Reserve for example). I put my return address and broker logo at top left; a snappy/interesting/appropriate quotation underneath that; my personal message underneath that with a jpg image of my personal first name signature; my photo about 3/4″; my personal tag line (”I make house calls”, since I’m a Realtor); my name, title, lic# and all my contact info. That calendar postcard has a better chance of being kept all year than a standard sales advertisement postcard. And during the rest of the year I use pretty postcards also (rather than a sales pitch on the front) with my message on the back, to entice people to actually imagine they are receiving a pretty postcard rather than a piece of advertising (I want people to save the pretty picture to use as a bookmark or something). Since I’m not an in-your-face type of Realtor, I like the pretty postcard method; and my message on the back does my selling. Some cards are just to notify people of time changes, welcome new seasons, etc., but always always have a clear real estate message with it. As a last comment: anyone who plans on spending a lot of money buying marketing/advertising items and then spending more money mailing them (or spend time going door-to-door), should either take a marketing class or attend a seminar, or at least buy a good book about it first. Not only will you avoid some of the common mistakes, but you’ll also get some great ideas to try! You can mark up your book and tag pages all you want. (Or at least go to the library to do marketing research). Thank you again Jared – keep the tips coming!
Chad- the offer I refer to is some sort of incentive to get your customers or prospects to take some action. This can be a hard discount or benefit ($$ off, or % off, free X, etc.) or a softer benefit like a free consultation/evaluation, special hours or a special invite-only sale/event, etc. Ideally you can test different offers to see what works best for you product/service or business, but always try to include some sort of offer/incentive to get people to act.
Thanks for the comments Rochelle. Along the lines of good marketing books, I really like the “Duct Tape Marketing” book. It’s a great, practical resource for small businesses and has a chapter or two dedicated to direct mail/direct marketing. If any of you are interested, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a copy (jared@printingforless.com).
Jared – “Duct Tape Marketing: is a regular book – you’re willing to send it out free? (Did you buy out the publisher cheap or something?!)
Yes – just for you, I’ll send one out free
We have done some joint promotion with John Jantsch (the author) and we print for him as well, so we get a pretty good deal on his book.
Great tips on post cards! I was just gearing up to print one for my product. I would also like to get one of those books. tks
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